Reverse Symmetry

Diet Mission: Vegetarian

2012-02-28T10:20:00.000-08:00

This month's diet mission is a fairly simple one. I just have to avoid eating meat for seven days, eating three meals per day.

I've done this diet before, but as a pescetarian which is slightly different, so it's not something I'm entirely unfamiliar with. A pescetarian eats fish, or more accurately, seafood, but not any other types of meat. In other words, no mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians. (Those last two are pretty easy to avoid!)

Because I'm giving up meat for experimental purposes, I fully expect to miss meat, which is why I ate a bunch of wings on Saturday night before beginning my new diet. However, that doesn't mean the week will be bland; I'll be able to have all the candy I want! Hooray!

Plus, I really like mushrooms, which are sort of like a vegetarian's meat. I know many people assume that's the role of tofu, but the notoriously tasty fungus is actually a more suitable meat alternative.

Vegetarian Philosophy

To live on a meatless diet, or rather one that does not directly lead to the death of any animal. (This includes any creature in the animal kingdom.)

Why the Vegetarian Diet?

There are three main reasons why someone would choose a meatless diet, and any vegetarian may be personally motivated by one or more of the following reasons:

Health. To avoid red meat, or meats in general and their high propensity for food-borne illness and the potential threats to cholesterol and other health factors. Usually, someone who avoids meat purely for health reasons will follow a pescetarian diet, which includes high protein and omega-3 fatty acid levels.
Personal taste. Some people just don't find meat appealing. This was the main cause of my previous meat avoidance. For some reason, I just couldn't look at meat without thinking about it being a dead body, leading me to imagining it analogous to eating roadkill, which made me want to throw up. I had nothing against others eating meat; it was just a matter of personal taste.
Political beliefs. A vegetarian is often motivated to give up meat because of their intention to not create demand that leads to animal slaughter. There are many, many differing beliefs in this category that range from abstinence for a clear conscience to a pursuit of the universal banning of meat production.

Substitutions

By day two, like any good withdrawal, I was beginning to truly lament my new diet. After more than 24 hours of eating nothing but mushrooms and candy, I was craving bacon. Steak. A hamburger. It was time to get the next best thing: A veggie burger.

This also allowed me the chance to explore the vegetarian options at a typical fast food restaurant. One thing that's great about this diet is that it encourages you to avoid eating fast food, because you can pretty much only order the fries. (Although, now that I think about it, I wonder if the meat at a fast food restaurant is so far removed from nature that it could be considered meatless…)

Never mind that. I went to Burger King to order a veggie burger, which is not listed anywhere on their menu. After all, if anyone was going to do a vegetable-only variation on the classic burger, it would have to be the King, right?

I had ordered this item a few weeks ago—with bacon, as a joke—and it ended up being pretty good. As it turns out, it was without a doubt the bacon that lent it that flavor. This thing tasted like a bunch of beans, corn, and carrots smashed flat, which is exactly what it was. It sucked. And it wasn't Burger King's fault, either. Veggie burgers just have nothing on the real thing.

Veggie foods in denial

Vegetarians in transition, and some who like to amuse themselves, will buy products from the grocery store that emulate things like ground beef, turkey slices, and chicken wings. It could be denial. It could be nostalgia. It could be the irony. Whatever the motive, meat-emulating products are relatively popular, and they're all terrible.

There's good news, though. After a while, the memories of the sweet, savory taste of bacon and steak fade away. You begin to honestly believe that the occasional veggie burger tastes "just as good as the real thing." You're so used to eating handfuls of nuts all day that you no longer feel the need to eat soybean hot wings anymore. Yep, eventually the only meat substitutions you truly need are mushrooms and beans.

Benefits

Aside from the aforementioned avoidance of fast foods, the reduction in cholesterol and saturated fats supplied by red meat, and the clear conscience of knowing that you didn't throw money at presumed animal cruelty, there's one very obvious and immediate benefit.

I rediscovered this as I did a round of grocery shopping at the end of day three. An entire cart of groceries that would normally cost well over $100 came out to just under $80. I had reduced my grocery bill by more than 20% just by not buying meat. How was this possible?

Rather than buying chicken, ground beef, pork chops, and steak, I was buying mushrooms, potatoes, and tomatoes—all significantly cheaper. I didn't need to buy any candy because I still had a ton left over from Halloween when no kids came to see the elaborate haunted house on my porch.

Why People Hate Vegetarians

On day four of my veggie excursion, my office ordered pizza for everyone. I always appreciate free lunch, but I had to consider my diet and realized that if I didn't speak up, every pizza would have pepperoni on it. I'd need to put in my request before the order was made. A special request—just for me.

"Can we get one that's just cheese? I can't have—" I stopped myself. Saying "can't" was a big pet peeve of mine last time I went down this road. On a voluntary diet, it's not that you can't have meat; you choose not to. If your throat swelled up like someone with a shellfish or peanut allergy, then yes, you could say that you can't have those items. So how to phrase the fact that I was making free lunch difficult merely to accommodate myself?

"I—I'm not eating meat right now," I said. I had figured the plain cheese pizza would be a decent compromise, since not everyone likes a massive pile of vegetables. However, the bean dip was out of the bag. I now had to explain the motivation for changing my diet.

My experiment offered me a great excuse. But when a long-term vegetarian describes their motives, it comes off a bit holier-than-thou. No matter how it's explained, a meat-eater hears this:

Health-seeking vegetarian: I don't eat meat because it's bad for you, and that's why you feel tired all the time and you're going to die before me.

Meat-taste-hating vegetarian: Meat makes me gag for some reason. Yes, I know this makes me completely insane.

Politically motivated vegetarian: I don't eat meat because I don't support vicious murder, like YOU, you MURDERER.

In the past, I found it easier to just avoid this situation altogether by not mentioning my diet. I don't ask someone why they don't eat the crust of their pizza, and I expect them to not question why I'm shunning pepperoni.

Dining Out

On day six, I went out to eat with my wife, son, brother, and sister-in-law. I picked a Thai restaurant because they tend to make meat-free food taste really, really good. There are a handful of dedicated vegetarian restaurants around town that we could have gone to, but that would have forced everyone into my diet for the evening. Plus, many of those restaurants tend to do wacky things like serving only room temperature water.

It's surprisingly hard to find restaurants that feature flavorful vegetarian food. Many places will have an obligatory option like a "veggie wrap" (which is about 90% bean sprouts) while others just don't grasp the concept at all. However, it's not their burden to provide you an option, just as they don't have to put diaper stations in the bathrooms. It's entirely up to them to determine whose repeat business they want.

But again, Thai restaurants are especially good at meaty and meatless options, and asian food in general is a pescetarian's paradise. However, no matter where you dine, there's always the chance that something will go wrong.

The Polite Vegetarian

On day seven, the last day of my diet mission, I went out to dinner with my wife's family at an Italian restaurant. Italian is great for a vegetarian, because there are plenty of tasty options that are meatless, consisting of pasta, sauces, garlic, and tons of butter. I ordered the baked cheese ravioli and enjoyed an endless stream of garlic rolls and vinaigrette-covered salad until the food arrived.

It was utterly and completely drenched in ground beef in a way that would make it impossible to just eat around it. There must have been a whole pound of it. I was excited, because I really wanted to eat meat but wasn't supposed to, according to the rules of my mission. I ate it anyway.

What were my other options? I could have asked them to take it back and make it again with no meat, or I could have just not eaten it, wasting my in-laws' money. Should I have known this menu item would have meat in it? It wasn't listed anywhere. Ravioli isn't a meat-covered dish unless it's specifically ordered that way, and there was a ravioli with meat sauce just underneath it. Either the menu didn't list it correctly or the server brought me the wrong thing.

The polite vegetarian breaks their diet and eats it anyway so they don't aggravate anyone with the nuances of their adamant chosen diet, and this is the approach I'd take every Thanksgiving when I'd be around ham and turkey, any time I'd go to someone's house and they'd serve me a roast or salad covered in bacon bits. I would be eating something I didn't really like just to appease the people providing it for me.

Sustainability

This was a pretty simple diet to get used to, compared to some of the others that have been proposed to me. If you can get past the initial meat withdrawal and find accommodations for yourself without aggravating those around you, there's really no problem. You may have to cook two meals for your family, but it's not too much of a burden.

Over the week, my weight didn't change at all. Any saturated fats I was avoiding from meat were supplemented by the saturated fats I was gaining in cookies. I didn't feel weak or lacking in any way.

I would say that this diet is highly sustainable if you make sure you're getting the proper nutrients and not just eating candy. Just try not to be too smug about it.

I Want to Get Quaked

2012-02-21T12:13:00.002-08:00

Did you feel the earthquake today? If you live in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, or Wisconsin, were awake at 4:58 AM EST (3:58AM Central), and were standing entirely still without any audible background noise, you probably did.

A magnitude 4.0 earthquake occurred at the New Madrid Fault between St. Louis, Missouri and Memphis, Tennessee at that moment. Yes, a 4 on the Richter scale isn't particularly impressive, but this earthquake was relatively shallow—3.1 miles deep, specifically. That's probably the only reason it was felt in 13 states.

By comparison, the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed 316,000 people had an epicenter 8.1 miles deep and was a 7.0 on the Richter scale. A mere 3 miles deep is shallow enough for even the weakest earthquake to be noticeable.

I didn't feel it because eastern U.S. earthquakes are apparently nocturnal by nature and I slept right through it. Of course, being 350 miles from the origin of the quake, it probably supplied less of a boom than the thunderstorms I regularly sleep through. And even if I had felt it, I probably would have assumed it was some early morning activity at the loading dock to the flooring warehouse in my backyard.

Location of this morning's earthquake on the New Madrid Fault

There's almost no way to tell when an earthquake is about to strike, so it's pretty much impossible to listen for it. For people like myself who have always lived far from an active fault, we'd probably never know it was happening. Seismologists can look for foreshocks, but the problem with foreshocks is that they're only classified as such after a more powerful quake happens shortly afterward. With that logic, a 7.0 quake that crumbled thousands of homes could just be a foreshock to an 8.3 that happens just days later.

Further complicating the matter is that earthquakes are happening constantly. In fact, in the 24 hours before today's New Madrid Fault quake happened, there were 25 earthquakes worldwide, 18 of which were more powerful than 4.0. Many of these numerous daily quakes happen in the Pacific Ocean or elsewhere on the Ring of Fire, and most of them at a depth of more than 10 miles. I guess if you lived in the Ring of Fire you could predict that an earthquake would happen any day with relative certainty, but it would still be impossible to pinpoint a small window of time to expect it.

I missed my last chance to feel an earthquake in Georgia when I slept through a shallow one on April 29, 2003. It was a significantly stronger 4.9, and a mere 72 miles away, but it also happened just before 5 AM.

A geologist friend of mine later told me about how incredibly excited he was, jumping out of bed and yelling, "I think that was an earthquake!" Many other Georgia residents were talking about it all day.

"I thought it was a bomb!"

"It knocked a picture off my wall!"

"My dog knew it was coming and pooped on the floor right before it happened!"

I don't know why all these people were up so early. I suspect some of them were trying to make me jealous. Well, it worked.

I want to feel that earthquake. I've been in several tornadoes, and while their power is nothing to scoff at, there's just something more exciting about the planet below you groaning and rearranging itself on a massive scale. Let me clarify something, though: I don't envy those in major disasters, nor do I want to be in their situation. It's just that an earthquake in Georgia is pretty much guaranteed to be nothing more dangerous than a firework being set off in the parking lot outside of your apartment window; a natural disaster worth experiencing. By comparison, a tornado can hit you in the face with a cow.

I've seen floods. I've been on the receiving end of the dying arms of a hurricane's spiral many times. I've driven through half a dozen tornadoes. I could take a vacation to see an erupting volcano as soon as I have the money. Once, just once, I want to feel an earthquake.

Physically Deleting Bad Memories

2012-02-17T06:43:00.005-08:00

Sometimes the fourth dimension can be held still by the other three. Certain locations conjure memories almost as well as they convey the present. If you think about it while you're there, just standing in the same physical space where something notable happened at some point in the past will make you feel some sort of a connection to the event.

The bomb was placed near the rightmost small green building

I felt this way as I stood in Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, across the street from the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola. I was looking for the exact location of the bombing that occurred during the Olympic games in 1996, and was standing in the spot that my research led me to conclude was the exact location where the explosive device detonated. Hours before this happened, I had been in the park with a friend's family; later that night I saw my dad glued to a television watching news footage of the terror attack play on a loop.

I looked at the park, very much different than half a lifetime ago when the attack happened, and envisioned a nighttime scene of nearly a hundred people injured by shrapnel. Though the only people in sight were tourists in winter coats, I felt I was more vividly able to experience the dramatic scene simply by standing where the explosion occurred.

Then I walked up Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard with the hope of finding the pay phone that Eric Rudolph called in the bomb threat with, just three blocks away. He hadn't wanted to hurt any children or individuals he deemed "innocent," so he picked up the pay phone to call an operator. Despite placing a deadly device nearby, his intention was to evacuate the park, leaving just police officers nearby to be injured. When the operator picked up, he had just enough time to read the words "We reject your—" before being hung up on. The telephone operators during the Olympics didn't have time to mess around.

I searched, but the pay phones were gone. The phones were gone due to being obsolete and not due to any negative publicity, but I couldn't help thinking about what it might have been like to pick up the handset he used and hold it. I certainly don't respect his actions, but there's something curious about that thought that can't quite be explained.

It's the same reason tourists in New York City gather outside of The Dakota building where John Lennon was shot. It's part of why Auschwitz still exists — as a museum. It's very much the reason that the hypocenter of the nuclear attack on Nagasaki has a monument.

The precise location of the last wartime nuclear explosion

Not all notable physical locations memorialize terrible events, of course. We can stand where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, visit Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and think of the dozens of movie scenes that have been shot there, or visit the Alamo or any other fort in the world and think about the brave soldiers who fought to the death there.

As I headed toward the Georgia Aquarium, I shuddered while thinking about the free Nickelback concert I had attended on that plot of land just a decade before. Not all physical locations are notable.

But while massive disasters — nuclear bombings, concentration camps, the World Trade Center attacks — are hideous on such a scale that they cannot, should not be forgotten, some horribly tragic events are just small enough that society chooses to delete them. If they can't get them out of their mind, at least they can wipe them off the face of the Earth.

Houses that serial killers committed their heinous deeds in can still be sold. There's no law against it, and no law requiring disclosure of the events at any point. There's always going to be tourists and entrepreneurs looking to experience or capitalize on the macabre so one might expect that these structures might stick around, but the people in the community generally decide to completely eliminate these locations altogether (whether by public agreement or anonymous vandalization). I'll admit that I'll drive past one of these locations just as I'll drive past the birthplace of MLK, but sometimes it really is better to forget.

Here, then, are a collection of 5 notorious mass murder locations deleted from the Earth.

H. H. Holmes' castle

W. 63rd Street and S. Wallace Street, Chicago, IL 60621

During the 1893 World's Fair, evil opportunist Herman Mudgett set up camp in Chicago by building a block-long three story hotel to house fairgoers. Known to the neighborhood's residents as Dr. H. H. Holmes, his "castle" was a landmark for many of the locals. On the inside, it was a confusing maze of more than a hundred rooms, mostly windowless, with trap doors, dead end staircases, soundproof rooms, and torture devices. He used gas lines to suffocate his victims and dumped their bodies into the cellar via chutes attached to many of the rooms.

Holmes was eventually captured and charged with a handful of murders, even though he confessed to more than 27. Very soon after his capture, the castle burned to the ground. It has been presumed that the residents could not stand the thought of such a devilish structure looming over their neighborhood any longer, especially with prospectors looking to turn it into a tourist attraction.

Today, the plot of land is occupied by a U.S. Post Office, possibly because no one else would build on the land.

Gein farm

Archer Avenue and 2nd Avenue, Plainfield, WI

Ed Gein is not remembered for the two murders he committed as much as he is notable for being an extensive body snatcher. His childhood and early adulthood were dominated by an overbearing and overprotective mother who convinced him that the world outside was dangerous and that everyone was evil. She'd beat him and his brother mercilessly. His older brother died of a heart attack during a brush fire, and when his mother subsequently passed away, he lost his last friend in the world.

Gein filled the void by digging up corpses in nearby graveyards and manipulating their bodies. He'd turn body parts into household items such as cookware and belts, but also made a suit out of female body parts to fulfill a wish to be transgendered. The bizarre practices occurring on his extremely rural farm were exposed in 1957 when a sales receipt linked him to a missing person whose body was later found on his property.

In early 1958, the property was scheduled to be turned into a tourist attraction but, just like the Holmes hotel, it mysteriously burned to the ground. Today, the site is overgrown with trees and there is no evidence of any structures, with the exception of one poorly maintained dirt road.

The Polanski-Tate residence

10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90120

Film director Roman Polanski resided here with his very pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, in the 1960s. It was a large, classic estate built in the 40s and previously occupied by numerous Hollywood socialites before becoming the site of one of the most horrible murders in Los Angeles history. The followers of Charles Manson killed six people on the property in a senseless massacre intended to spark a race riot in the city on August 8, 1969.

Despite an enormous amount of publicity surrounding the home, the property changed owners for many years and continued to have occupants. Trent Reznor, the musician behind Nine Inch Nails, was the last to live in the house. After meeting Tate's sister, he decided that living in the house was actually insulting to the victims and allowed it to be demolished — but not before taking the famous front door to be installed in his New Orleans recording studio.

Hollywood producer Jeff Franklin purchased the property in 1994 and built a new mansion in its place. The new address is 10066.

John Wayne Gacy's Chicago home

8213 W. Summerdale Avenue, Chicago, IL 60656

Though sentenced to 10 years in prison for sodomizing two teenage boys, Gacy was released after just 18 months in June of 1970. Forbidden from seeing his wife and children, he moved to Chicago where he lured young men to his house, murdered them, and buried them in the crawlspace. He committed so many of these crimes that he ran out of room under the house and in the yard and began throwing bodies into a nearby river.

When a 15-year-old boy went missing after telling his mother that he was going to see about a job with Gacy, policed arrived at his house with a search warrant. A relatively lengthy investigation resulted in the discovery of more than thirty victims. Gacy actually assisted on-site during the exhumation of the bodies, providing highly accurate details about where they could be found.

The house and everything else on the property was demolished in 1979. The lot stood empty in the neighborhood for years until another house was built in its place — with a different street address.

Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment

924 N. 25th Street, Milwaukee, WI 53233

Dahmer moved into apartment 213 in May 1990 and began murdering there within two months. He had already killed five people, but did so while living with relatives. This was his own place, where he could do whatever he wanted with people. It wasn't really his intention to kill anyone, but that was the only way he could think of to make them submit to his will. He killed twelve people in the apartment, keeping body parts in various states of decay, including several human heads, severed hands, and a heart in the refrigerator.

Neighbors complained of the smell, but he wasn't caught until June 1991 when one of his victims escaped and brought the police back to find numerous photos of his deceased victims and a large barrel with a decaying body in it.

Dahmer's crimes were so horrifying that the entire apartment building was torn down. At one point, plans for a memorial in its place were made, but the idea never materialized. The lot remains empty.

Looking at these locations, I realized that two were in Chicago and two were in Wisconsin, and all four involved the individual's own residence while the L.A. incident happened in a victim's residence. Is there something about the cold weather of the Great Lakes that makes psychopaths act violently within their own homes? Who knows.

In the case of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing that I missed by only a few hours, the incident killed one person directly and lead to the heart attack of a camera man running to cover the chaos. But because 111 people were injured, a memorial was placed in the park called the Quilt of Remembrance. It's not the exact location of the bomb's detonation, but sometimes you don't really need to be quite that accurate.

Daytrip: A Triumvirate of Monadnocks

2012-02-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

About 300 million years ago, Africa slammed into North America at the incredible rate of 1 inch per year, crumpling the Earth's surface and pushing mountains high into the air. Where mountains did not form, the extreme pressure melted rock, some of which exploded out of the surface as volcanoes. Some balls of liquid rock floated up toward the surface like massive underground bubbles, but cooled into rock instead. Millions of years later, rain washed away the softer crust, exposing the granite mounds.

The Gum Pole

It was one of those mounds of granite that I was stretching on next to an electrical pole covered in chewing gum that had been driven into its surface. My brother and I had resolved to climb Stone Mountain that morning, a particularly prominent rock outcropping known as a monadnock. Generally speaking, a monadnock is different than a traditional mountain in that it's basically the cooled contents of a volcano that never exploded, while a mountain consists of layers of rock pushed upward by tectonic forces. This is why mountains generally slope or are jagged while a monadnock looks like the exposed upper half of a ball (which is effectively what it is).

There are many monadnocks in the piedmont region of Georgia (everything above several hundred feet in altitude), and most of them are near Atlanta. This is because the city is the halfway point between the Appalachian mountains and the coastal plain. Stone Mountain is world-famous, but very little is known about its two monadnock neighbors, Arabia and Panola Mountains.

Because they are so close together and open to the public for hiking, we decided to conquer all three in one day. Each are easy-to-moderate hikes of less than a 3 mile round-trip, so there wouldn't be any question about whether it would be possible.

Stone Mountain

We began at Stone Mountain, the most famous of all southeastern U.S. granite domes. Arriving in the parking lot of the walk-up trail on a Sunday at 9:30 AM, I expected the place to be packed, but the 32 degree weather probably prevented that. We hiked upward, past the gum pole, past countless chunks of dislodged granite that made it feel like we were climbing a one-mile-long staircase. A covered gazebo 75% of the way up provided picnic tables for a quick break before completing the most difficult—and steep—portion of the trail. Metal railings driven into the granite ensured stability in this section.

Before we knew it, we were at the top—a large, mostly flat peak almost entirely devoid of plant life. The peak is surrounded by a chain link fence that prevents you from falling to your doom, and a nice, clean building at the top contains bathrooms and water fountains. It's all very unique and scenic, but there's nothing like the view.

In all directions, especially on a day with unlimited visibility like the one we were experiencing, one can view all of north Georgia. Looking east, the relatively impressive skyline of Atlanta, Buckhead, and Sandy Springs; further north, Kennesaw and Sweat Mountains are visible, followed by an extremely long line of the Blue Ridge Mountains that stretch into North Carolina. (Click here for a full resolution version of this panorama.)

The Blue Ridge Mountains

From here, I tried to locate Arabia Mountain by sight, but it was blocked by a slightly higher neighborhood in front of it. At nearly 1700 feet, I expected to be able to see anything, but I couldn't see through the hillside that was taller than the next mountain we were headed to.

We walked to the north face of our monadnock to look down at the artificial-snow-covered field 800 feet below. Children mounted inflatable tubes and were pushed downhill by employees underneath the looming shadow of the world's largest bas relief sculpture: A 3-D rendering of three Civil War generals on horseback more than several hundred feet in height. We stood beneath the first skylift transit of the day, my brother eagerly anticipating the screams of terrified passengers, but it was empty. On the far side of the mountain, opposite the walk-up trail, no one was present; just us, a waist-high chain-link fence, and signs that said "DO NOT CROSS". My brother begged me to take a photo of him standing on the other side, which I did, immediately calling the police because he was breaking the law. Criminal!

A 15 minute stroll back down the mountain led us to a now very full parking lot, where we consulted the map to determine the best way to get to Arabia Mountain.

DIRECTIONS TO THE STONE MOUNTAIN WALK-UP TRAIL (from I-285):

Take I-285 to the east side of Atlanta
Take Highway 78 east to Stone Mountain
Veer right onto the Memorial Drive exit
Veer right onto the E. Ponce DeLeon Ave. exit
Turn left onto E. Ponce DeLeon Ave. and head into downtown Stone Mountain
Turn left onto James B. Rivers Memorial Dr.
Pay $10 to enter the park, then turn right
Turn immediately left into the parking lot of the walk-up trail

Arabia Mountain

Our next destination was the place that had sparked my interest in monadnocks to begin with. Sure, I took Stone Mountain for granted like everyone else, mostly because it had been turned into a major tourist attraction (and for good reason), but Arabia Mountain was something new. Something relatively untouched. A place where movement wouldn't be restricted to the confines of a chain link fence. Somewhere I could fall to my doom if I chose to. And it was free.

We drove south out of downtown Stone Mountain after stopping at a German bakery for a massive pretzel, passing through the highly industrial towns of Redan and Lithonia. Arabia was a well-kept secret because most Atlantans steer clear of this part of town. It's not dangerous, but it didn't seem like there would be a unique, high-quality hiking trail anywhere nearby. We didn't expect one either, until we arrived.

We parked on the west side of Klondike Rd. at a free parking lot with a welcome center for the park and made a quarter mile hike on a well-paved wide path to a boardwalk on the other side of the street. The mountain immediately loomed over us like a mini-Stone-Mountain. I didn't see a single person anywhere nearby, except those in their cars zooming past us. Unfortunately, we were stuck on the boardwalk, hovering ten or so feet over the granite.

"I'm pretty sure we can just jump this railing and walk up there," I said, motioning to the peak. We decided to keep walking the boardwalk and see where it took us, which turned out to be a pretty good idea.

At the end of the half mile walk, we ended up in the parking lot for the Arabia Mountain walk-up trail. Turns out we could have just parked there to begin with. A small and seemingly unoccupied nature preserve was located adjacent to this lot.

Stonecrop at the peak

The walk-up trail, dotted by piles of cemented rocks to mark the way, cut a sometimes narrow, sometimes impossibly wide path through the forest on its way to the peak, passing by an uncountable number of solution pools filled with tiny red plant called stonecrop (Diamorpha smallii). An old, abandoned, and hardly worked quarry was located close to the entrance, and judging by the massive piles of broken glass in the area, serves as a popular place for underage drinking. I imagined that later that night a group of high school kids would be sitting there in almost total darkness, sucking down watery beers and watching out for the flashlights of law enforcement. They probably had 100 escape routes planned.

Pushing on, we came to a clearing where nothing taller than my toes would grow: the peak. It was an easy climb, and we passed several other hikers with tiny dogs. I thought about my pathetic tiny dog and how much trouble he'd had hiking Amicalola Falls, considering this a much more suitable hike for him. I wished I had brought him.

Panola in the distance

At the peak, we looked to the southwest to see a very clear view of Panola Mountain, our next destination; to the west, the tops of downtown Atlanta skyscrapers peeked out over the trees; to the northwest, a very faint glimpse of an antenna sticking up over the tree line which we deduced to be the broadcast tower atop Stone Mountain.

Though we had a 360 degree view, it baffled me that I could not see Stone Mountain. As it turns out, though Arabia Mountain has a 180 foot prominence over the surrounding area, its 940 foot peak is actually lower than the average Atlanta altitude by about 60 feet. With nearby hills and trees reaching well over this height, our view of Stone Mountain was entirely blocked. That explained why I couldn't see it from the top of that other enormous monadnock.

To get back to the car, we decided to cut west and climb up onto the boardwalk. We clambered down precarious drops where stone had broken away thousands of years ago and appreciated that no one was telling us where we could or could not fall to our doom. Coming close to the boardwalk, the ground leveled off into the largest repository of broken glass I had ever seen in my life. If the quarry was a renowned drinking spot, this flat granite outcropping near the Arabia Mountain parking lot was an alcohol mecca. For hundreds of feet in all directions, chunks of broken glass smaller than two inches in diameter blanketed the ground.

And just as we were prepared to climb the railing up onto the boardwalk, we realized that we were at the entrance. We just had to cut to the right of it to make a quarter mile hike back to the car.

DIRECTIONS TO THE ARABIA MOUNTAIN MAIN PARKING LOT (from Stone Mountain):

Leave the park via James B. Memorial Dr.
Turn left onto Main St.
Miles later, cross the train tracks and turn left onto S. Stone Mountain Lithonia Rd.
In downtown Lithonia, veer right onto Max Cleland Blvd.
Turn right onto Main St.
Turn left onto Klondike Rd.
Go straight through the roundabout at Rockland Rd.
Turn right into the parking lot

Panola Mountain

The last monadnock in our journey was the most mysterious one. It was the only one of the three located outside of Dekalb County; it seemed significantly smaller than the other two, but taller than Arabia; it was mostly covered in trees, but from my view of it from Arabia, there would clearly be photo opportunities and skyline to be seen.

We turned right out of the Arabia Mountain parking lot and several miles later ended up in the parking lot for the Arabia Mountain Trail. Parking cost us $5 in an envelope in a big green box, so we were glad to have some cash on us. I walked up to a bathroom to see a sign that said, in no unclear terms, that the walk-up trail was not to be attempted without a guide. The guide would cost $7 per person, and was only available on Saturdays at 3 PM. We sat down and waited for 146 hours.

In reality, we decided to see if we could discreetly hike it anyway. A big, picturesque lake marked the entrance to the path, which was a continuation of that wide paved path we'd walked on at Arabia. We passed by a decaying barn, which urged us not to step off the path. Later, we passed a chimney in the woods, where signs yelled at us to not step off the path. A short while later, we passed by TWO chimneys in the woods, where a sign threatened us within an inch of our lives if we stepped off the path. Before reaching the fabled double chimney, we had seen a side path cut off to the south with a sign warning us that would be mercilessly beaten for stepping off the main path. We kept that in mind as we looked for somewhere we could clip off into the woods, but the very strict code of conduct in Rockbridge County was starting to get a bit unnerving.

The Forbidden Trail

Eventually we came to a large footbridge with a maximum weight limit of 999 pounds. Since the river underneath it was the border between Rockbridge and Dekalb counties, we realized we'd gone too far. The only side path we'd seen must have been the one leading up to the mountain's peak, but we were being threatened with execution for attempting it. After breaching the fence at Stone Mountain and uncovering two hotbeds of illegal activity at Arabia Mountain, we decided not to push our luck and walked back to the car.

The strict rules at Panola were disconcerting after the unbridled freedom we'd enjoyed at Arabia. Though Panola is apparently taller, Arabia wins for its openness.

DIRECTIONS TO THE PANOLA MOUNTAIN PARKING LOT (from Arabia Mountain):

Turn right out of the Arabia parking lot onto Klondike Rd.
Go straight ahead at the stop sign
Turn right into the parking lot approximately 20 inches later

So there you have it: The monadnocks of East Atlanta. It's easy to hike all three in one day, even if you're not terribly in shape. But if you want to reach the peak of each, make sure you're at Panola at 3 PM on a Saturday. Had I known this ahead of time I would have spent $12 on Skee-Ball at a local bowling alley.

The monadnocks are a bit of an oddity. They're giant bubbles of cooled lava that attempted to float upward and explode out of the earth. Whether walking on them, having a picnic on them, or chugging fermented barley on them, you should never forget that you are standing on a frozen moment in volcanic activity. It's as if someone hit the pause button and then let the ground wash away around it so you could enjoy its upper portion.

When you're sick of hiking in the woods, there's always the alien landscape of the monadnocks.

How to Bypass the Wikipedia Blackout

2012-01-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

The short answer:

Add "?banner=none" onto the end of the URL, like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony?banner=none

The long answer (explains how the blackout works and the manual removal):

The Wikipedia blackout brings up a message about Internet censorship over every article you search on the site (except the article for "censorship", of course). This is to draw attention to the SOPA bill that is working its way through the U.S. Congress right now.

Visiting an article, such as "irony":

Causes this blackout message to appear after a quick moment, showing you what you're missing:

The mechanism behind this blackout is a trifecta of changes to the source code after a few seconds:

A style ID is added to the <head> called "mw-sopa-blackout"
All visible content on the page has an inline style applied called "display:none" which renders the content invisible
The blackout message is overlayed on the page using a <div> with the ID "mw-sopaOverlay"

Getting Rid of the Wikipedia Blackout Message

You can reverse all of these changes manually by using a code editing browser plugin such as Firebug. Here's what you need to do:

Open Firebug and look at the very bottom of the <head> section. Click the <style id="mw-sopa-blackout"> code and press the Delete key.

Look near the top of the <body> section for <div id="content" style="display:none;">. Click the "style" part of this line and press the Delete key.

Note: The overlay text from the blackout message still exists, so step 3 is still necessary to truly remove the blackout.

Go to the very bottom of the <body> section. Click the <div id="mw-sopaOverlay"> code and press the Delete key.

That's all there is to it. You can go through and remove all the "display: none;" code if you like, but the article's content should now be visible.

Death to QWERTY

2012-01-13T11:06:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder why your keyboard is laid out in such a strange pattern? The letters seem to be randomly arranged, and the rows are placed at strange, off-center intervals instead of being on a neat grid. Even a cell phone’s virtual keyboard has rows that aren’t always arranged neatly. Well, there’s a good terrible reason for that.

How QWERTY Became King

Remington No. 2

Most likely, you’re using a QWERTY keyboard. You’ll know if you look in the top-left corner of your keyboard and see that the first six keys spell out this strange word. The layout has been around since 1878 when Remington released their groundbreaking No. 2 typewriter—which was also the first device of its kind to allow the use of both upper- and lower-case letters.

At this point, QWERTY was the natural evolution of eleven years of typewriter development. The earliest machines used the logical approach of arranging the keys in alphabetical order; unfortunately, many keys that are used in succession were placed next to each other. You may be asking yourself “Why is this a problem?” The answer is something that anyone born after 1980 has never experienced: typebar jams.

Jammed typebars

Back then, being an era in which horses still provided the main means of transportation, each key was connected to a long bar with a reverse cast of the letter being depressed on the end of it. When two keys immediately next to each were depressed at the same time or repeatedly in succession, the arms could get tangled up in each other. Since each key is firing its arm at the same spot on the page, collisions were inevitable. It was a fact of life in the typewriter era, and the only way to reduce jams was to move commonly used pairs of letters apart on the keyboard.

So we ended up with QWERTY, in which common pairs of letters are somewhat spaced out, and very little of the natural alphabet exists (except for DFGHJKL on the home row—a whole string of the alphabet, sans vowels).

These type arms are also the culprit behind the staggered arrangement of the keyboard’s rows. In a grid, type arms would have to go above or below each other. By shifting the rows slightly to one side, type arms could move past the upper rows easily.

The Dvorak Layout

Eleven years is not a particularly long time to perfect a technology—especially not during the heart of the Industrial Revolution. It was inevitable that someone would develop a new keyboard arrangement that made more sense. August Dvorak rearranged the keys in 1936 to create a more simplified keyboard that aimed to put commonly used letters together again. Improved technology ensured that jams were less frequent, so splitting up common letter pairs wasn’t as much of a concern; typing fast and accurately while reducing repetitive strain injuries was the main focus.

Dvorak’s layout allowed a typist to alternate hands and fingers more often, put typical combinations close together, and placed the most common letters in the home row, right in the middle of the keyboard. It was an all-around more efficient layout—when typing in English.

This new layout still used staggered rows, however, to accommodate the typebars.

So why do we still use QWERTY?

A whole mess of reasons have blocked Dvorak’s layout—and any other attempt—from acceptance. When it was revealed, the country was deep into the Great Depression, and few manufacturers wanted to invest in a new standard and change their designs and parts casting. Since no one else cared, no one ever learned about it. Dvorak remained largely anonymous for half a century.

Then in 1985, Barbara Blackburn set a world record by typing an amazing 212 words per minute on a Dvorak keyboard. For a brief moment, the world was intrigued by this unheard-of keyboard layout. It seemed to be the way of the future.

Unfortunately, support fizzled out. Everyone was too used to the QWERTY keyboard and the muscle memories they’d developed over a lifetime of typing on it to take the time to learn a new layout, which brings us to the current state of keyboards.

In America, we tend to adhere to many illogical standards based on antiquity. We measure long distances in miles, miles in feet (5,280 of them), and feet in inches (12 per). These seemingly random numbers contrast starkly with the meter (100 of which equal a kilometer, and they split neatly into 100 millimeters). We don’t make the switch because we’re too conditioned to the system we’re already using. The same can be said about gallons and liters.

But why the staggered rows? Again, it’s the muscle memories responsible for this. Because we are encouraged to learn to type without looking at the keyboard, the keys need to be in precise locations. If we pushed the keys into a neat grid, it would screw up typists everywhere. They’d be hitting the edges of keys, hitting the wrong keys, probably hitting the person sitting next to them out of frustration.

By the time computers overtook the typewriter market, just about everyone in the world was typing, and doing so with QWERTY. Blackburn’s publicity could have been a big push for the more efficient Dvorak layout, but the opportunity was missed.

Software standards began to be developed with QWERTY in mind. Many program shortcuts use the Alt, Cmd, or Ctrl keys paired with a letter in the lower left corner of this layout. (Ctrl+Z, +X, +C, and +V perform the main clipboard functions in nearly every Windows program.) Changing to a different layout would require a major upset in software standards just as much as it would require everyone in the world to re-learn to type. It’d be very much like everyone learning to write with the opposite hand.

This doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice. You can absolutely buy a Dvorak keyboard, and many operating systems allow key mapping that rearranges inputs to adhere to this layout. Virtual keyboards can do whatever they want, so a quick app install on your mobile phone can provide a new layout in minutes.

But hey, those virtual keyboards: Are they even necessary anymore? Since it’s impossible to type with all your fingers on a tiny screen, and a bit of a chore on a tablet, couldn’t we re-imagine text input altogether?

That’s exactly what Snapkeys aims to do. By using a unique layout that fits into four different invisible panels, users can actually input text faster than using a keyboard—and do it with just two thumbs.

If we ditch QWERTY, we’ll be doing ourselves a favor, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Eventually, we’ll need to start doing what’s logical, instead of simply accepting outdated standards.

The Incredible True Story of Gilligan's Island

2012-01-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

In the Fall of 1964, CBS television had a problem: An open time slot and nothing to go in it. The gap occurred during prime time, and the network was reluctant to simply show reruns of an existing program. They knew that they’d have to show something original if they wanted to hold the attention of the viewing public.

CBS’ executives called a meeting to determine how best to solve the problem. They piled into the board room, holding their scotches and dry martinis. One man stood in the front of the room, casually swinging a golf club and looking at no one in particular.

“What are we going to do, boys?” he asked of no one in particular. Grumbling filled the room as each avoided sticking out his own neck. Finally, someone spoke up.

“Well... we do have that stupid island show. What was it called? 'Mulligan Island'?”

The suggestion sparked the interest of the golf-happy exec, who stopped swinging his club and looked the suggester dead in the eye. “Yeeees… let’s take a look at the pilot for that one,” he slyly suggested. “Have my secretary bring in the reel.”

In a matter of minutes, the group was subjected to a calypso-style theme song describing an inane premise. “Holy geez, screw this!” one of them yelled.

“Who composed this?” asked the boss as he walked over to the reel’s case, reading a name off of the side of it. He turned to his secretary. “Get me Johnny Williams. Now! And get me some vomit bags for the boys!”

Small groans evolved into full-on wailing as they continued to watch the pilot. Sweat poured down their faces and stained their white collars. A few begged for mercy; one passed out from the pain.

“This is terrible!” someone shouted.

“But we don’t have anything else to put in its place!” another countered. “Aaaaraaaaauughhh!”

The film ended, its terminus flapping around on the receiving reel. Everyone sat in shock. Finally, the boss hit the stop button. The secretary knocked on the door.

“A Mr. Williams, sir,” she said, cracking open the door.

“Ah, great. Have this reel destroyed,” he ordered. “Actually… hold on to that. Just bury it somewhere.” He greeted the composer with a warm handshake.

“So, Mr. Williams,” he said, looking him straight in the eye, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Johnny didn’t know how to respond. “What do you mean, sir?” 

“It’s just that you’ve written the stupidest song of all time,” he countered in a booming voice. “How do you explain yourself?”

Johnny looked down into his hands, cowering slightly. He looked up into the executive’s eyes. “I was contracted by a Mr. Sherwood Schwartz, sir,” he said. “I was to give a quick back story on all the characters in this show to explain the premise so that they could get to the episode with no delay.”

“Ah, so I suppose that’s why these castaways just immediately started building huts and all kinds of silly rubbish, eh?”

“Yes, sir. They hired Bob Denver, that guy from ‘The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.’ You know, the one with the goatee? Well, he’s supposed to play the title character, a dimwitted sidekick.”

“Ah, that makes perfect sense. To be juxtaposed with a dimwitted boat captain, a dimwitted millionaire couple, and some dimwitted secretaries?”

“And the professor!” someone yelled from the back of the room.

“Uh, I suppose so. Yes, sir,” Johnny sheepishly answered.

“I knew I recognized the guy,” the executive said. “We cancelled that piece of junk, and now we’re going to be filling the same slot with the same moron?” He lit a match and puffed on his cigar, looking up at the ceiling.

“Well, you tell this Mr. Schwartz, whoever he is, that we want his crummy show. There’s just going to be some changes.” Someone accidentally emitted a terrified shriek.

“Oh, Mr. Schwartz is highly respected!” the composer responded. “He’s written for Bob Hope, Ozzie and Harriet, Red Skelton—”

“Apes could write for Red Skelton!” the executive angrily shouted. “And we want a new theme song. Something that’ll be mercilessly stuck in your head for decades, not some calypso garbage like the thing you’ve composed. That’s how you sell a TV show!”

“Yes sir. I’ll have him contact you.”

A few weeks later, Schwartz had retooled his program, replaced some of the actors, and written a new theme song. Several introductory episodes were shot and edited just in time for his meeting with the hardened board of executives.

He took his first steps into the goliath CBS building and walked up to the secretary’s desk holding a stack of reels. “I’m here for the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ meeting,” he told her.

“Right this way!” she said, standing up and leading him to an elevator. “They’ve been expecting you,” she said, then turned and snorted a bit. Arriving at the top floor, she cracked open a large oak door and stuck her head in.

“Mr. Schwartz is here,” she announced. “You can go right in,” she said, and pulled the door wide open. He walked into a hazy room full of grizzled men staring at him with amusement and contempt. The executive set down his golf club and snuffed out his cigar.

“I hope this is good, Schwartzy,” the executive threatened. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Sherwood queued up the first reel and flipped the switch. Instantly, a completely new theme song filled the room. Its lyrics were punctuated by the sounds of someone gagging.

The executive stopped the reel at the end of the introductory credits. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Why do we need to fit the entire backstory into this silly theme song?”

Sherwood became defensive. “I don’t believe in exposition,” he said with confidence. “I would like each episode to begin with the viewer understanding the castaways’ predicament. We can accomplish this in just one minute at the beginning of the show.”

“Who wrote this?”

“I did.”

“Oh,” said the executive, caught off guard. “I thought you… looking at you, I would have expected that you’d have better taste.”

Sherwood gave him an angry scowl.

“I like this ‘And the rest’ thing at the end, though. Viewers want to watch this Denver guy, the captain guy, the cranky millionaires, and that hot bimbo. No one’s going to care about the rest of those jerks. Good job.”

He flipped the switch to start up the reel again. The episode played for hardly more than five minutes before a board member fled the room, shouting “I can’t take it!” Several utilized their barf bags.

As the reel ended, the executive looked at Sherwood and flipped the room lights back on. He clapped once. Then again. Then again, slowly increasing the tempo of his clapping. Everyone else joined him until the room erupted into all-out applause.

As it ended, Sherwood couldn’t hide his confusion. “Hey, I thought you hated it? One guy ran out of the room crying, and some of you threw up. This guy was stabbing into the table between his fingers with a pocketknife.”

“Let me tell you something, Schwartz,” the executive began. “In all my years in television, I’ve never seen someone create a program so bad and still win a prime-time slot. Congratulations.”

Sherwood didn’t know what to make of this.

“You see, we’re screwed, my boy. It’s either run your program or air something old and stale. We’d rather keep the time slot warm until next season when we can show something that isn’t more irritating than a cold toilet seat in the middle of a hurricane.”

“Uh… thanks?” Sherwood said. “So you want the whole season, then?”

“Don’t have any other choice. But we’re filming it all on low-quality stock, black and white. None of this fancy color crap. If it’s going to be a stupid empty island, might as well not be modern. But you only get one season!”

Sherwood shook some hands and left the room, off to tell his staff the great news. One season meant 36 episodes! They were going to make a lot of money.

The knock on the executive’s door nearly caused his golf club to go flying out the window. “What is it?” he angrily shouted while biting down on his cigar.

“A Mr. Denver is here to see you,” the secretary said.

“Denver… Denver… where have I heard that name before?” he pondered. “Send him in.”

Bob Denver walked into the room.

“Mulligan!” the executive shouted. “Nice to see you. Here to resign?”

Bob didn’t seem too amused. “No, I’m here to talk to you about the theme song. Have you guys got a few minutes?”

“Yes, yes, it’s terrible. Sit down,” the executive offered. “I told that no good Schwartz not to write that dumb song himself. I mean, it’s catchy. Gets stuck in your head. Drills itself way down in there and makes a nest. But geez-o-pete, could it be any stupider?”

“Oh, it’s not that. I quite like the song,” Bob replied, “It’s just that Dawn and Russell’s characters aren’t in the lyrics.”

“What do you mean? Oh, you’re talking about the rest of those jerks,” he replied. “Who cares?”

“It’s just that it’s only two names. I feel like we can make this work. Instead of saying ‘And the rest,’ why don’t we say ‘Professor and Mary Ann’?” he suggested, singing the notes.

Everyone in the room burst into laughter. Their screaming cackles drowned out Bob’s voice as he angrily looked around the room and tried to further defend his case. After a few minutes, the hysterics died down enough for Bob to continue.

“I’m serious, you guys. Dawn and Russell deserve the respect.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” the executive shot back at him. “We’d have to reshoot the entire introduction, which would cost way too much. And the season’s about to end, anyway. Yep, your little show is about to be cancelled.”

“Why would you do that?” Bob cried.

“Because it’s a turd on television,” he said, giving him a big thumbs-down and making a loud flatulence noise with his mouth. “It’s only there to keep the night’s programming moving along.”

“Even though it’s hugely popular?”

Again, the room burst into incredible laughter. “It’s hugely popular!” someone mocked in a high-pitched voice over the roar of shrieking and chortling.

“No, really!” Bob shouted. “Check the ratings.”

The secretary was called in with the week’s ratings. “Yep,” she confirmed, “It looks like this show’s a hit—in all demographics.”

Everyone in the room sat in stunned silence, motionless, their jaws hanging open. Someone suddenly puked under the table.

“So this thing’s bringing in some money, eh?” the executive said. “Well, we’re not going to waste more of it by re-shooting a scene just to add in the names of two fictitious dingbats.”

“Oh, yes you are!” Bob replied.

The executive walked up to Bob and stood right in his face, any trace of amusement completely vacant. “And why’s that, buddy?”

Bob opened up the envelope he was carrying and pulled out a stack of papers, spreading them on the table. His finger landed on a specific line. “See that?” he asked.

Everyone crowded around to look. It was his contract with the show, and it stated that Denver could choose to have his named placed anywhere he liked in the credits.

“That’s right. I can force you to re-shoot the credits,” he threatened. “So you might as well do what I’m asking and add in their characters’ names.”

The executive stepped back and looked at the scrawny actor. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “Did that no good farm girl put you up to this?”

“No, actually,” Bob replied. “And I don’t plan on ever telling them.”

And so a new season began—in color—with the new theme song.

For two entire seasons, the castaways endured hardships and experienced great adventures. Another 62 episodes made their way to television. The entire production crew hated it. The critics hated it. But for some reason, the general public just fell in love with Gilligan and his band of hopeless acquaintances.

Then, in the summer of ’67, Sherwood Schwartz made his way back to the CBS building, clutching a briefcase and stacks of loose papers falling to the ground. “Here for the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ meeting!” he shouted, bursting through the front door of the CBS building.

He ran into the meeting room and slammed his briefcase down on the table. “Glad to see you all, glad to see you. I’ve got some great ideas for the upcoming season,” he said. “A Skipper lookalike appears on the island in this episode, and in these two we have elaborate dream sequences that involve—”

“Not gonna happen!” the executive screamed in his face in a sing-song voice. He then strolled back to the front of the room and lit up his cigar, puffing it and blowing smoke up into the ceiling of the room.

“What do you mean?” Sherwood asked. “Ok, if you don’t like those ideas, I’ve got a great one where the gang builds a cannon out of—”

“Stop, stop, stop,” the executive said. “We’re canceling your show.”

“What? Right now?”

“Yeah. It’s done, buddy. We’re moving ‘Gunsmoke’ to your time slot. So deal with it.”

“What? Why would you do that?” a shocked Sherwood inquired.

“‘Cause President Paley and his wife Babe want it that way. The show’s getting terrible ratings running so late on a Monday night, so we’re pushing it back to your 7:30 slot.”

“Couldn’t you put ‘Gillilgan’s Island’ on later? I mean, they haven’t even been rescued yet!”

“Nah, screw those idiots. No one likes them anyway.” He picked up his golf club and began to swing it, looking several hundred yards through the wall. “We’ll just send out a press release saying they all died or something.”

“They starved to death!” someone shouted.

“They were murdered by natives!”

“They all got really bad syphilis!”

“Yes, yes, any of those would do. Draft that up, Schwartzy.”

Sherwood looked around the room in horror. “No!” he screamed. “No!!!”

He shoved his way out of the large oak door. “No!!!” he shouted, running to the stair well and bursting through the door, stumbling down the steps. He wailed in horror as he descended floor after floor, screaming in disbelief.

“NOOOO!!!!!” he shrieked as he ran through the lobby, shocking everyone that watched him screaming and running at full speed, ramming into the front door of the building. The sounds of squealing tires echoed from outside the doors as the maddened writer ran off into the distance.

Sherwood Schwartz went on to produce and write the theme song for The Brady Bunch.

Johnny Williams dropped the “ny” and composed for film, writing the scores for E.T., Jurassic Park, and dozens of other movies.

Bob Denver was arrested for marijuana possession in 1998 after Dawn Wells allegedly mailed a large box of the contraband to his home.

Adams, Cecil. "Was the "Gilligan's Island" theme song tampered with?"
"CBS Studio Center"

"Gilligan's Isle"

Shales, Tom. "Hey, little buddy! 'Gilligan' DVD drifts into port". The Washington Post, February 8, 2004, page N1.

Stevens, Dana. "Gilligan's Dreams"

Stoddard, Sylvia. "TV Treasures – A Companion Guide to Gilligan's Island". St Martin's Paperbacks, 1996.

Have It Your Way, You Masochist

2012-01-09T07:19:00.001-08:00

I'm not generally a big fan of fast food. I like it, and think it tastes good, but there's no denying that it's low quality (unless of course, you're a PR firm representing a fast food empire, in which case it’s perfectly normal to be in complete denial).

Common sense tells us that low quality food should not taste good, but Americans continue to jam the drive-thru every morning and stop in on their lunch breaks. Much of this can be attributed to the “fast” aspect, but people actually claim that they really think the food tastes good. Why?

Flavor enhancers. They’re cheap, effective ways to make food taste better; unfortunately, they generally carry health risks when used to excess. Fortunately for fast food restaurants, your health is not a concern to them.

The mechanism behind flavor enhancers is the activation of the salty, sweet, and umami taste receptors. Everyone is familiar with the bitter, sour, salty, and sweet taste receptors, but umami is a more recently discovered taste that senses and sends a “savory” signal to the brain. Those three tastes stimulate the reward center of the brain, while bitter and sour tastes often carry a negative association.

To make terrible food taste good, fast food restaurants douse their products in flavor enhancers that tickle that happy part of your brain. Here are a few widely used enhancers:

Salt: One of the oldest known flavor additives. It’s so cheap that a pound of table salt costs something like 59 cents. I honestly have no idea how Morton’s stays in business when i give them two quarters and a dime once every five years. Unfortunately, salt has also been linked to high blood pressure and heart disease. Activates the “salty” taste.
High fructose corn syrup: Refining sugar from sugar cane and then bleaching it to make it white costs a lot more than you’d expect, and it takes a lot of sugar to override bitter tastes, such as those found in tea. Major players in the food industry turned to this substitute because of corn subsidies provided by the U.S. government. It has been suggested that it contributes to habits that keep the body permanently hungry, leading to obesity. Activates the “sweet” taste, of course.
Monosodium glutamate (MSG): This white powder tastes bad by itself, but can make just about anything taste more “savory.” As a result, it is widely used in many fast-food-style products. Health consequences have been suspected but never proven. Activates the “savory” taste.

And then there are the fats: Cooking oils, butter and butter substitutes, and all those high-energy (high-calorie) ingredients that combine to make your face explode with happiness. Fast food has always been criticized for its high caloric levels, and as a PR strategy, many companies have decided to go transparent, shifting the obesity blame to the consumer (where it probably belongs). Most of these companies list nutrition values clearly on their websites.

Burger King goes one step further and makes it into a BurgerTime-style game of sorts, supporting their “Have It Your Way” slogan with a meal-making gizmo on their website that lets you create just about anything. I created everything from a hamburger with no buns to a pile of condiments before deciding it would be funny to add everything available, just to see what kind of health nightmare I might face.

I love the way the meat tower blocks the word "nutrition."

The food generator encourages you to “Share Your Meal” with others, or print it out and take it to the nearest Burger King to have them create it, ensuring that you can Have It Your Way. Presumably, they have some way to calculate the cost of your Frankenburger. I decided to print out my thoroughly unrealistic monstrosity and find out how much a 13,670 calorie burger with 876 grams of fat might cost.

“Hello, welcome to Burger King. Can I have your order?”

“Yes, I printed out this burger I made on the website. I was wondering if you could give me a quote on this.” The cashier stared at the printout, then politely asked me what the hell it was. “It’s a burger-maker thing on your website. You build your own thing, then bring it here to have it made, right?”

She had never heard of such a thing, and called over a manager.

“Sir, is this a coupon? I’m not sure what to do with this.”

“You’ve never heard of the burger-maker thing on the website?” I asked. They confirmed that they had not. I was still determined to have it my way, anyway.

“I’ll take a veggie burger—with bacon,” I said, completely ruining the purpose of the meatless patty. I hadn’t done any research ahead of time to see how the caloric content compared, but considering that MSG and salt are entirely flesh-free, I presumed it would be loaded with flavor enhancers.

I went home and built my confused sandwich using the website’s tool; without bacon, I had still broken 1000 mg of sodium and 16 grams of fat. I had truly believed that I was eating healthier, but as it turns out, you can’t even Go Veg at a fast food restaurant and get something healthy. (Note: 1000 mg of sodium in the sandwich alone is roughly half the recommended daily allowance.)

So I guess I can’t really have it my way, assuming “my way” doesn’t involve exacting a slow and destructive toll on my body. Well, you could always go for a salad. Just don’t use any dressing.

The 5 Most Disturbing Christmas Songs

2011-12-20T05:51:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that Christmas has become primarily a marketing scheme used to push wares that vary from desirable to entirely useless. One need only reach out to the world via a trip to any retailer or just by turning on a television or radio for undeniable proof of this. But beyond the gaudy displays, frenzied shopping, and seasonal sweet aromas, there's an incredibly powerful marketing device employed at this time every year: Christmas music.

We hear it every year, whether Pagan, Christian, or Jew. Christmas songs are broadcast into our ears from Halloween until New Year's Day to help "get you in the spirit of the season" (which translates into "shopping"). Some people truly enjoy it. Some people hate it with extreme malice. One of the main problems is that there's not much variety; in fact, there's only something like 35 Christmas tunes that are played regularly, and not one of them was released recently.

A Christmas song generally fits into one of two categories: Carols (mostly written in the mid-19th century) and radio hits (mostly written in the mid-20th century). These carols are generally what you might consider to be a "traditional" song. Here's a selection of a few of them:

Away in a Manger: 1885
Deck the Halls: 1881
Good King Wenceslas: 1853
Silent Night: 1859
The Twelve Days of Christmas: 1780
We Wish You a Merry Christmas: 17th century

These songs are generally focused on being merry, enjoying tradition, and actually recognizing that Jesus guy that the holiday is somehow related to. In the days before the Sears catalog, Christmas wasn't really about buying gifts with a panicked expression on your face, it was mostly a time to recognize the beginning of the harsh Winter months and enjoy the warmth of fires, food, and company.

The radio hits of the 1940s and 50s brought us a completely different spin on things. Tiring of the stuffy atmosphere provided by these traditional tunes, record producers sought to write new Christmas music to accompany shoppers as a new era of the holiday season began to emerge. The trend began in 1934 when "Winter Wonderland" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" simultaneously emerged, kicking off two decades of similar songwriting. By 1970, when "Feliz Navidad" hit the radio, the trend was over.

What we are left with is a curious mix of dusty old tunes left over from a pre-electricity world juxtaposed with upbeat tunes that feature a drumkit-driven backbeat. And the newer tunes, as "cool" as they were when they were released, attempted to jazz up the genre with occasionally ill-conceived subject matter.

Here, then, are the five most disturbing Christmas songs of every holiday season, imposed upon us for half a century of season's greetings.

Winter Wonderland — 1934

Okay, so it's not actually that disturbing to us in these times, but in the 30s this song was considered scandalous. It alludes to a romantic couple who intend to elope:

"In the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is Parson Brown"

"Parson Brown" is actually a made up character. A parson, at the time, was a protestant minister who would travel to towns performing wedding ceremonies:

"He'll say 'Are You Married?' We'll say 'No man, but you can do the job when you're in town!'"

Then the two intend to deceive their family, bringing shame to generations:

"Later on, we'll conspire as we dream by the fire,
To face unafraid the plans that we've made"

Yeah, I know. Not that disturbing. But consider that elementary school children sing this song every year!

Santa Claus is Coming to Town — 1934

I often unpopularly refer to Santa Claus as "Training God" because children, who have little concept of eternity, can be tricked into acting morally straight if they think Santa is all-knowing and might choose not to bring them workshop-built video game consoles. This is the song that cemented that view of the jolly gift-giver into our minds.

"He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake"

Thinking of God or Jesus watching over us at all times isn't disturbing, and can actually be comforting for many. But there's something about a guy who actually comes into your house watching you while you're sleeping that's just unsettling. Yep, this is when Santa started to become sinister.

"He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!"

Considering the fact that Santa appears to be a real guy you can meet and sit on the lap of at the mall, this is just weird. It's like he's following you around with binoculars, watching you from behind a tree while you shove other kids down a metal slide. As we'll see in the next few songs, Santa might be omniscient, but he's not necessarily omni-benevolent.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — 1939

This incredibly famous song of adolescent bullying originally appeared as a poem in a coloring book being distributed by retail giant Montgomery Ward as a Christmastime promotion. The song paints a morbid picture of psychological torture perpetrated upon the eponymous reindeer by his peers.

"All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names,
They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games."

Imagine poor Rudolph, discriminated against just for being different. We supposedly learn a lesson about acceptance as his unusual nose becomes the device that saves Christmas, leading the sleigh through especially foggy weather:

"Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say,
'Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight?'
Then all the reindeer loved him."

Oh. OH. NOW you love him. If I was Rudolph, I sure as hell wouldn't be their friends. Dicks.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus — 1952

This holiday classic features a boy's perception of his mother's infidelity, and not just with some strange man. No, in fact, the child's entire moral foundation is shaken as he witnesses his own mother cheating on his dad, while simultaneously witnessing Santa, the gift-giving diety, cheat on his own wife, solidly placing him on the naughty list:

"I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe last night."

Had he been caught spying on them, they might have used the mystical plant hanging over their heads as justification. After all, if two opposite-gendered people notice they are standing underneath it, they have to kiss, right? But that doesn't explain this next part, wherein mommy gets frisky:

"Then, I saw mommy tickle Santa Claus underneath his beard so snowy white."

Presumably, this is where the kid gets the hint and leaves town for a life on the rails with a scabby old dog, eating out of garbage cans and telling everyone he meets the story of how his mother is a whore. But no, the child chooses a more healthy defense mechanism: Laughter.

"Oh, what a laugh it would have been if daddy had only seen mommy kissing Santa Claus."

What a laugh indeed, if by "laugh" you mean "bloodbath."

Santa Baby — 1953

As if these portrayals of Santa as a creepy stalker, irresponsible caretaker, and adulterer weren't bad enough, this song makes him the target of a sultry temptress who intends to arouse him into giving her unreasonable gifts. After all, she's been an "awful good girl," right?

"Think of all the fun I've missed, think of all the fellas I haven't kissed."

That's right, she's well aware that no one, not even Santa, wants to get involved with a girl that gets around. In many later versions (Madonna, Taylor Swift) the vocal tone is replaced by lifeless interpretations relevant to the popular music of the time (New Wave and Pop Country), but in the original Eartha Kitt recording, her clear intent is to seduce Santa. And I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to think about what's going on in Santa's giant fluffy red pants.

"Santa cutie, and fill my stocking with a duplex and checks."

Now to fully understand why this is the most disturbing Christmas song of all time, picture this for a moment: Santa is standing there in her living room after breaking into her house. She's wearing a sparkly cleavage-exposing cocktail dress with a giant slit up one leg, singing this line to him. His cheeks become rosy as usual, but more because he's a little embarrassed. Is there anything more disturbing than a man in a Santa suit chuckling awkwardly as his giant belly bounces around while a woman performs a sexy routine for him? Maybe if she was also tickling him under his white beard.

Day Trip: Longswamp Valley

2011-12-12T09:58:00.000-08:00

Georgia, like many other places, has seven natural wonders. Or rather, someone compiled a list of “Georgia’s Seven Natural Wonders,” the seven most compelling natural formations in the state. Georgia is big for an eastern state, so unfortunately, the wonders are widespread and few are close to Atlanta. Stone Mountain is the exception, but everyone in this city has been there a thousand times.

However, I noticed that the list has changed over the past century. When the first list was compiled by librarian Ella May Thornton in 1926, it included two items that were replaced. One was Jekyll Island’s forest (and anyone that knows me well knows I go apeshit for Jekyll) and the other was “The marble vein in Longswamp Valley in Pickens County.”

At the time, Jekyll Island was an exclusive retreat for the world’s richest white folk, only accessible by ferry and special invitation. This major publicity as a playground for Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies probably earned it its place on the list. Today, it’s been developed with bulldozed dunes, beachfront hotels, and golf courses, and the maritime forests are still attractive and mosquito-filled, but it has been booted from the modern list.

But enough about Jekyll. I’ve been there more than twenty times. I was more intrigued by this marble vein in Pickens county—a mere two counties north of my house. This meant that an Atlanta resident could take a day trip to see it. I just had to figure out where Longswamp Valley was.

Sometimes Google is no help. A search for “longswamp valley” consistently returned the 1926 natural wonders list and nothing else. I suspect that this article will now be in the top ten results because of this. Maps didn’t clarify anything. I resolved to drive through the area and find a non-violent local for further guidance.

I figured my best bet would be to head toward the community of Marble Hill, a relatively short drive down a two-lane highway at the end of interstate 575. After all, if there’s a marble hill, there’s likely a marble valley nearby, right?

So I took I-575 north to its end point, where it begins its life as a regular ol' highway and turned right at the first light, heading eastbound toward Tate. This town has a history of marble excavation, so I presumed that someone in the area would know what I was looking for.

Georgia Marble Company, ca. 1930s

Pickens County’s history is based entirely around the marble industry. Laying pretty far east of the rail line that birthed Kennesaw, Marietta, and even Atlanta itself, very few had ventured into its endless woods in the early 19th century except for the Native Americans that had lived there for ages. For more than a thousand years, these natives were aware of the curiously pure rock that jutted out of the earth in a stretch nearly five to seven miles long, and word eventually got around to pioneering entrepreneur Henry Fitzsimmons who intended to work the marble in the 1830s. His early efforts were crude and unfruitful but paved the way for the establishment of the railway into Tate and the successors to the marble industry fortune, including Col. Sam Tate who became the president of the Georgia Marble Company in 1905.

Marble coming from Pickens’ quarries was quite popular, being used to build the Lincoln Memorial, New York Stock Exchange, and countless other prestigious public and private spaces. By the 1930s, marble demand began to slow down, but the Georgia Marble Company continued to hold the market on high quality marble production.

As I began my trek off the beaten path and into the rural heartland of the Appalachian foothills, dotted by collapsing long-abandoned houses, rusting automobiles, and dogs chasing my car down the street, I pondered the list in my mind. Why did Providence Canyon—a 150 foot deep chasm in southwest Georgia created by erosion due to irresponsible farming techniques in the 1800s—replace Jekyll’s forests as a wonder? Why did Radium Springs, also in southwest Georgia, bump this amazing marble vein from the list?

Entering Tate, I crossed train tracks partially overgrown with weeds and stopped at an ancient train depot. It looked like something that might host a Postal Service hook for mail delivery in the 1800s. Consistent with almost every other structure for miles, it needed a new roof and its wood siding was beginning to rot. Preservation efforts were clearly considered, due to a sign posted next to the road:

HISTORIC

TATE DEPOT

SCHEDULED FOR RELOCATION AND

RESTORATION IN 2006

The Tate House

Like nearly everything else in marble country, even its preservation had been forgotten. I pressed on in search of the former wonder, and began looking out for my next landmark: The Tate House, a pink marble mansion open for weddings and bar mitzvahs. As the road began to drop in altitude for the first time in miles, I spied it through the trees on the right and pulled onto a short but paved road leading to a rear parking lot. The road forked to the left toward a marble processing plant and passed to the right behind seven small wooden cabins. Sitting in my car in an empty parking lot, I stared at the convention center attached to the back of the mansion, admiring the smooth marble walls. Had it not been 7:30 AM on a Sunday, they might have been open for tours. I got back on the road heading east.

Literally a few hundred yards back on the road, I crossed a bridge labelled “Longswamp Creek” and the road began to immediately ascend. The creek was at the bottom of a small valley! I had found it without having to consult a scary local! My mind snapped back to the marble processing plant I had just seen, and I pulled a stupid and dangerous three-point turn on a double blind curve to rush back to it. These words were emblazoned in huge, bold letters on the front of the building:

GEORGIA MARBLE COMPANY

I had found it! The plant’s gates were closed, but a sign on the razor wire fence declared that visitors could report to the main office, which I could have done if it wasn’t 7:35 AM on a Sunday. My marble vein lay just beyond that slicy barrier, and I wasn’t going to see it.

When I got home, I consulted Google Earth to see a massive white streak in the belly of the valley. As I zoomed in, I began to be horrified. The front of the plant that I could see was only the beginning of an incomprehensibly large marble mining operation that stretched nearly an entire mile. Every conceivable speck of what could possibly be considered part of the wondrous marble vein had been worked and split up into chunks. This wonder could no longer appear on the list because it hardly continued to exist—at least not in the form it had in the 1920s.

I’d still like to visit it, but I’d bet that 85 years of increasingly efficient excavation techniques have killed the magic a little bit. But for anyone else searching for the great marble vein of Longswamp Valley, here’s how you get there from Atlanta:

Take I-75 north from downtown Atlanta, past I-285
Veer to the right onto I-575 North and follow it until it ends, becoming Highway 5/515
Turn right at the first traffic light onto Old Waleska Road, Highway 108/53
Cross the train tracks in Tate and look for the historic train depot
Continue east about 1.25 miles until the road begins to go downhill
Turn right onto Georgia Marble Road (also the access road to the Tate house)

200 Georgia Marble Ln.
Tate, GA 30177

Paused for Sixteen Years: Teenager of the Year

2011-12-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

I pulled the unfolding stairs down from the attic by a decaying, dangling rope as my brother gently rested its feet to the ground. I followed him up into the nostalgia dungeon in search of something long forgotten in the archives of my parents’ attic. We had a mission, but became immediately distracted by the relics of an earlier age: The Atari 2600, a wood-paneled game console; the creepy, cobweb-covered rocking horse eyeing us dangerously from the periphery. But it was in a shoebox containing a dozen or so random items where I made an unprecedented discovery.

It was a transparent and unlabeled cassette, through which I could see words hand-written on the case insert. I would have disregarded the tape were it not for two distinct words poking through in exactly the right spot:

Olé Mulholland

I traced back through my memories to determine the source of this phrase which caught my eye. Suddenly, my brain returned an answer.

“Oh my god, do you know what this is?” I asked my brother. He looked at it, but continued digging through another box of useless-to-anyone-else contents. I flipped the case open and yanked the tape out, confirming my excited suspicions. “This is Teenager of the Year by Frank Black!”

My brother looked at the tape, but couldn’t recall the source, and couldn’t understand the reasoning behind my excitement over one old bootlegged album on archaic magnetic media. I imagine few could, but I understood exactly why this find was so special—and the gift that I would get to reveal the next time I placed it into a tape deck to spin its reels once again.

You see, this is a wholly immense album, released in an incredible moment in music history. The year was 1994—one of the best years for music of my lifetime—and Frank Black had just disbanded the Pixies, a group ten years ahead of its time. That four-piece had almost single-handedly birthed the “alternative” music scene that was so prolific in that same year. Black had reinvented himself, becoming less a teacher and more of a peer. It was his second of many solo albums, and widely considered to be his greatest effort ever.

The single-disc album features an insane 22 tracks and never loses momentum. And these weren’t leftover Pixies songs either; those were released on his self-titled debut the previous year. Yes, Frank Black had written twenty-two non-filler tracks for this album within a year, without having to use any recycled material.

And he did so with the best possible musicians as well. Joey Santiago from the Pixies followed him to play on five of the album’s tracks, with nearly all other non-Black guitars handled by the inventive and talented Lyle Workman, a man who would go on to great success as a session musician and soundtrack composer. Captain Beefheart keyboardist Eric Feldman handled both the bass and synthesizers. It didn’t hurt that Nick Vincent was the perfect drummer for the songs, either.

Someone had given this tape to my brother before he moved out of my parents’ house in 1995, judging by the context of the shoebox’s other contents. This meant that this tape had been sitting dormant, waiting patiently for at least 16 years, paused during a time when the album was still brand new. It was like finding an unopened Surge soda, and there was only one way to find out if the contents had degraded. Each spool held a more-or-less equal roll of tape—the album had been stopped mid-song.

I still have a tape deck in my car, but my CD player died. As a result, I use a tape adapter to my MP3 player, but its battery dies often, leaving me to the choices of silence or, even worse, the radio. I desperately needed a Car Album to keep in the glove box for emergencies, and I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate record to hold that honorable title.

With an average song length of two minutes, fifty-one seconds, the album plays like an old Beatles record, switching songs before the listener can get bored with the current melody. It opens with “Whatever Happened to Pong?”, a spastic, nostalgic tribute to simpler times. Lyrical content is strong and well-founded, featuring political commentary (“Thalassocracy”), the magic of the Great American Road Trip (“Calistan”), and a literal-yet-not-obvious tribute to the Three Stooges (“Two Reelers”). Black proves his worth as a science fiction buff with inventive tales of Mars, the space race, and terraformation (“The Vanishing Spies”, “Big Red”), a direct reference to sci-fi tome A Wrinkle in Time in the album’s lead-off single, “Headache”, a tale of alien abduction in “Fazer Eyes”, and even the paranoid ramblings of a consipracy theorist who believe satellites are controlling his mind (“White Noise Maker”).

A particular gem lost in the middle of the album includes the retrospective critique of the practices of circus magnate P.T. Barnum in “Superabound” in which Black “bought a ticket to the freaks” only to become Barnum’s proverbial “sucker born every minute.” It’s tough to place the song into a specific category due to its catchy, snappy guitar leads and jolly organs, but it’s a perfect example of the kind of magic that can happen when you put Black in charge of such a varied and talented cast of musicians.

Beyond “Calistan”, the story of Black’s migration from his native Boston to Los Angeles, the album is clearly influenced by the Golden State. The aforementioned “Olé Mulholland” gives a transplant’s perspective of life in L.A., including the recollection of famed architect William Mulholland who built the aqueducts that made life in the desert possible. “Space is Gonna Do Me Good” is a futuristic tale about his projected eviction from the city to “the islands of Phoenix in 2016” when southern California is fabled to be completely underwater.

The album has its low moments, too, but even those are not so bad. “Speedy Marie” is an earned self-indulgent ode to romance in which the first letter of each line in the coda spells out the full name of Black’s girlfriend at the time. “Sir Rockaby” is an ironically not-rocking ballad. But when you put “Headache” between them, somehow it works out.

The only time Black really falls into the character of his own legacy is during “Freedom Rock,” in which snarky employees of a record store try to tell the songwriter of the Pixies what albums he should be listening to. The fallout from this is severe, as indicated by the sampled gasps of horror heard in the background when Black relates this part of the story. Beyond this brief moment, he’s happy to focus on cranking out incredible music and thought-provoking storytelling. The album ends on a high note with the upbeat, feel-good sun-worshipping song “Pie in the Sky”.

As I cranked up my car to leave my parents’ house, I held the cassette in my hand. Who made this for my brother? Did he listen to it? Why did someone eject the album mid-song? I put the tape down, deciding to never solve any of these questions. After all, it would be a shame and a waste to open an ancient can of Surge, too.

Then, at the last moment, I stuffed it into the tape deck. “Speedy Marie” was playing, and I wasn’t surprised.

Delicious Nostalgi-O's

2011-08-31T08:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to buy all my groceries from the Publix BOGOF list lately (Publix honors partial-purchase discounts, so buy-one-get-one-free means 50% off for me.) These kinds of promotions aim to get you to try something you’ve never purchased before, or to get you to pick up something you haven’t touched in a long time. I’ve tried just about every type of spaghetti sauce and frozen pizza, and I’ve discovered a few that are actually pretty good, so this type of promotion must be effective.

In the “stuff I haven’t touched in years” category was a BOGOF coupon for Cap’n Crunch cereal. I usually only eat grown-up cereals these days, like Honey Bunches of Oats. You know, the stuff your parents might make you eat instead of Mega-Marshmallow Sugarsplosion. My experiment with half-off Fruity Pebbles went horribly awry, so I was skeptical. However, I needed cereal, so I went off for my first interaction with the Cap’n in more than a decade.

The most notorious thing about Cap’n Crunch is the way it tears away at the roof of your mouth. Whatever formula is used to create this cereal is designed to retain the eponymous “crunch” even when soaking in milk for a long time. In fact, during the years when all cereal commercials were 30-second cartoons, this cereal brand featured a gang of antagonists named the Soggies, morphable humanoids composed of thick, dripping slime intended to resemble milk.

Without bad guys to fight, what good would a cereal mascot be? And not only was he fighting their scheming ways, he was also preserving the integrity of his name. If the Soggies got to the cereal, the crunch would be lost. Unfortunately, the cost is the destruction of the inside of the eater’s mouth. This is what I was least looking forward to.

But wait, what exactly is this cereal? At least I know that Frosted Flakes is corn flakes covered in sugar. Honey Bunches of Oats has a pretty descriptive title. But what the hell is Cap’n Crunch? The ingredient list should help.

Corn flour
Sugar
Oat flour
Brown Sugar
Coconut Oil
Salt
Crushed-up multivitamins to achieve FDA guidelines for nutrition

After reading this, I expected a nice wholesome blend of corn, oats, salt, sugar, and more sugar. I imagined dumping all of these ingredients into a giant vat and stirring vigorously until it reached a consistency that would be thick enough to walk across, and then pouring it into thousands of weird square-shaped molds. I ate a bowl of the corn oat sugarsalt.

To my surprise, it tasted a lot more like peanut butter than I would have expected. And then nostalgia hit me.

You know how a specific smell can take you back to a time you’d completely forgotten? You may not even know what it is at first, but a unique odor can evoke memories more strongly than a visual or audio cue. Well, taste works very much the same way. I was immediately ten years old again.

A thick film of nasty sugarmilk-flour covered my mouth and instantly gave me halitosis. This was mixed with the slight taste of iron, not from the mineral additives, but from the lacerations to the inside of my mouth. I felt partially chewed cereal squares stabbing into my esophagus on their way to crunch-obliterating stomach fluids. It was disturbing, but it kind of tasted good. I couldn’t imagine why children would eat this. Then I remembered something important.

At some point, kids began associating the taste with emergency room visits, so Quaker Oats needed to devise a plan to draw whiny children back in. This goal materialized in the form of Crunch Berries. The cereal children loved and paid the price for now featured neon purple spheres with a berry-like flavor. One would assume that this was more of the corn-oat-sugar-salt mixture, but its rounded shape meant less jagged corners causing GI destruction.

This is probably the only part of the cereal that kids actually want to eat anymore, considering the wide array of cereals that exist now, with their panic-inducing colors. That mostly bland yellow square cereal with the occasional purple dots just wasn’t enough, which is why Quaker Oats had a brainstorm session that led to this spectacular and highly nutritious cereal:

Oops! All Berries is the newest in a line of Cap’n Crunch spinoffs, featuring a sheepish but strangely apathetic Cap’n on the box cover surrounded by dozens of neon colors. “Limited Time Only!” the box proclaims, probably because it likely also houses a smaller disclaimer somewhere about how repeated exposure to this much food dye could cause sterility. Regardless, the berry-wrap print should drive children into a frenzy. That’s right, kids, the Cap’n’s mistake is your reward!

So in a grocery store aisle with these three boxes, which one do you suppose the kids claw each other’s faces off to grab?

Oops! All Berries might not be around forever, but the Crunch Berries will. That leaves plain ol’ gross mouth-film-and-pain yellow Cap’n Crunch Classic by itself. So who’s its new target audience? I found out when I flipped the box to the back to play stupid kid’s games.

Shit. It’s me again.

Thirty year cycles, indeed. Cap’n Crunch is clinging onto my generation, all growed up and responsible, and our never-ending lust for nostalgia. It was what caused me to pick the box up in the first place. The Atari joystick and Rubik’s Cube on the back of the box appealed to my longing for a time when things were simpler and the Internet didn’t have everything, ever, instantly. Back when I was amused by impossible cubes and one-button gaming controllers. Why, I can even order a retro t-shirt if I want!

Nostalgia experiment completed, I put the box back in the cabinet next to the Fruity Pebbles to be thrown out in a year. Guess it’s time to go back to Honey Bunches of Oats.

Why Bookstores are Failing

2011-08-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been to Barnes and Noble a few times over the past year looking for a list of books, and it never turns out as expected. You’d think that someone tech-savvy like myself would have an e-reader or other means by which to read books, but honestly, I like the entire packaging of the book: The cover, the dimensions, the pages, illustrations if they exist, etc. I realize this is like holding on to the love of CDs, another dying physical media format, but really, e-readers lack a lot of the character that actual books do.

When I’ve made up my mind to get a book, I need to get it ASAP. I don’t want to put it on hold, I just want to go out and get it. I don’t want to order it from Amazon.com because I’m just too damn impatient for that. So I head out to my local bookstore—you know, the massive, mega-store for literature that choked out all the independent stores in the area. With two stories of books and the impressive ink-on-paper smell, they’re certain to have it, right?

First, I’d need to find the correct section. Fiction is easy; just look up the author in alphabetical order. But I’m a non-fiction guy, and those books are organized by genre. If I can’t find it, I’ve got to track down an employee to help. This takes a long time, because there are three employees, and two are at the registers.

Then I find the section, and the book’s not there, so I wonder if perhaps it’s in a different section. I’m not going to check all sections, so it’s time to hit up a computer and do a store search. While lots of places (Wolf Camera, libraries, Futurestore) have had these types of public computer stations for years that let you help yourself, book stores always require an employee to run the computer. If the employee is nowhere to be found, I generally just start pounding away on the keyboard and generally being a dick.

Once the employee shows up, or if they had lead me back to the computer after a failed aisle-search, it’s up to them to find the book for me. They do this by performing an Internet search—something I could have done from my phone. But with their special employee login information, they have the ability to see the stock of the current store and all stores in the area. That’s when this happens:

“We don’t have it here, but I can order it for you.”

What exactly does that do for me? I need that book tonight! If I had wanted to order it, I would have clicked “Add to Cart” when I had it pulled up on Amazon.com’s website when I was at home, credit card and shipping information saved, qualified for free shipping. And it probably would have been cheaper, too.

I understand that they can’t stock every book, but I’m not always looking for something obscure. For example, I knew what I was getting into when I walked into a Borders going-out-of-business sale, dragged an employee to a search computer, and asked her to look up LSD: My Problem Child. But when I go to a fully-stocked Barnes and Noble and I ask them for any book on art deco style—architecture, furniture, jewelry, anything—and the in-store hunt is futile, it’s extremely disappointing.

Instead, they stock tons of best-sellers and keep the racks short. They rely on “free shipping to the store” as a compromise for failing to provide you with the thing you want to give them money for. Occasionally, the in-store search leads to an area store that actually has the book, like when my wife needed Summer for the Gods the next day of school so we drove to a Borders 25 miles away to get it. That worked, but for a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of literature, it shouldn’t have been that difficult.

Bookstores think they’re competing with online book sales by having the ability to special order books, so they don’t feel as pressured to carry a well-rounded stock. But what they have is a major advantage over online sales: A brick-and-mortar store. I can order a book from BarnesandNoble.com as easily as I can order from Amazon.com, but I can’t go to the Amazon.com store in fifteen minutes to get The Heroin Diaries. I can pay $11.90 at both websites, or I can order it for $14.99 for the Nook or Kindle, the two websites’ e-readers. But if I don’t own an e-reader, or just want to be able to put the book on my shelf and want it tonight, I can always drive to the bookstore. Assuming they have it. When I get there, though, the answer seems to always be, “I can order it for you.”

It’s not the e-readers that are killing off bookstores. It’s not even the online sales. Webvan didn’t destroy Publix and Kroger. NewEgg.com hasn’t shut down Best Buy and Micro Center, or even the tiny Ginstar up the street. Sometimes when you need something, you want to get it right away, and the urge to read a book can be strong, even a craving. I might be on a plane tomorrow, or at jury duty. I might just have the weekend off work and want to sit in a hammock for hours. I definitely don’t have time for that book to be driven across the country to my front door when I should be able to find it up the street.

The Nuclear Paradox

2011-08-18T13:37:00.001-07:00

There’s something about nuclear weapons that is inherently exciting and ultimately frightening at the same moment. Perhaps it’s the sheer raw power held in such relatively small amounts of matter, or the poetic, untimely demise that a sudden flash of nuclear energy produces. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t grow up in a time where the threat loomed over us as an imminent doom: Not “Is it going to happen?” but “When?”

Of course, the bomb never dropped. Here we are, nearly two decades out from the “end” of the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are every bit a reality as they were before. Now, just as in the 50s and 60s, they’re used as a deterrent to aggression from other countries, and not so much as a method of attack during wartime. We’d never consider dropping nukes on Iraq or Afghanistan like we did to Japan. And why not? Collateral damage. We don't want to repeat mass civilian extermination.

In 1945, FDR died and Truman took the lead in the most horrifying war in Earth’s history. Hitler was done for, but we still had those pesky Japanese molesting our Pacific islands. After dozens of firebombs failed to halt Japan’s actions, Truman ordered the only two wartime nuclear weapon detonations in world history. So far.

These were puny nukes by today’s standards, detonating with a force of only 13 and 21 kilotons respectively. Regardless, the immediate deaths from the explosions totaled as high as 150,000 people and resulted in 245,000 deaths by the end of the year. It’s a good thing modern nukes have never been used, because they measure in megatons—more than fifty times the power of those two devices.

The Tsar Bomba, the most powerful weapon ever created, had an explosive yield of more than 50,000 megatons. That’s 3.8 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb that killed 80,000 people instantly.

Horrifying.

It wasn’t our bomb, either; it was the Russians’. Our mortal enemies. No wonder we were so paranoid in the 60s. We spent four decades aiming nukes at each other with military personel who had fingers literally inches from the launch buttons. The stalemate was the only thing that stopped this incredibly deadly near-genocide from actually happening. We got lucky—and by “we,” I mean humanity in general.

And yet there’s something so spectacular about watching nuclear explosions. Maybe it’s our affinity for fireworks; maybe it’s the knowledge that we, as advanced primates, brought them into existence; maybe it’s the graphic visual of what could very possibly be the last thing many of us see. We like to stare death in the face when we know we’re safe, and through the television or computer screen, there’s no risk of radiation.

The concept of “nuking” something made its way into comedy awfully fast, probably partly as a coping mechanism. From the bomb-riding captain in Dr. Strangelove to Nelson’s “Nuke the Whales” poster in The Simpsons, we’ve adopted it as a cultural nuance worthy of laughter. Had “The Bomb” killed millions every year for 67 years, we probably wouldn’t be laughing so hard, but at this point, we don’t really worry anymore anyway. It’s almost like we’re waiting for something to explode.

"'Nuke the Whales'?" Lisa Simpson asks Nelson in disbelief, "You don't really believe that, do you?"

"Gotta nuke somethin'," he responds.

Over the past two decades there have been numerous efforts to put an eternal halt to what has been considered the biggest potential threat in existence to life worldwide. The United States and Russia agreed to scale back their nuke stockpiles, but still openly maintain massive quantities (in addition to the secret ones they’re not disclosing). Nuclear testing has been banned for years. The United Kingdom, France, China, India, and Israel have all held them since before the end of the Cold War, but never had more than a few hundred warheads to match the U.S. and Russia’s combined total of 19,500 (that’s 19,500 after greatly reducing armament). In recent years, Pakistan and North Korea have joined the club, with Iran rumored to not be far behind.

Is there need for worry? India and Pakistan have feuded for a long time, and they share a border. North Korea has ICBMs that can reach California. Russia leads the world in active warheads. None wants to fire first because of the fear of equal or apocalyptic retaliation. However, the concern is that the first fired nuke, or even a misinterpreted nuke attack on its way, might trigger a domino effect of massive, deadly destruction worldwide.

There’s something a little bit magical about the thought of committing global suicide this way. If we can’t achieve world peace, maybe we should just pull the trigger. There’s always someone out there plotting world domination, anyway. I did it myself, recently, in a game called Civilization V, in which you play as the leader of a primitive nation that grows over time. There are four ways to win the game:

Convince the other countries to acknowledge you as their leader through diplomacy
Develop “The Utopia Project” through specific social policies
Win the “Space Race” by being the first to colonize another planet
Blow up everyone else.

It was my intention from the very beginning to thoroughly dominate the planet by force, so I intended to build nukes as quickly as possible. I played as Julius Caesar, leading the Romans who were known for their uncompromising military prowess. Due to sinking all of my funding directly into researching weapons technology and building my army, the rest of the world stood no chance against me. I completely obliterated them all just a few turns before developing nuclear weapons.

As I stood as undisputed leader of the world (since there was no one left to dispute it), I scanned the map and realized it was all mine. I could finally focus on cleaning up the poverty and famine in my cities. After a few turns, my scientists informed me that the nuke was ready to be used. Unfortunately, there was no one left to nuke.

As I toiled away, mining and farming the Earth for the benefit of my citizens, my massive military aimlessly roamed the planet with no mission and no purpose. We developed the cure for cancer, and the infantry didn’t care. We built a spaceship and colonized another planet, and yet there was still no need for the military.

Then one day, as a fleet of adamantium-plated tanks rolled through a more remote region of the planet, they happened upon a barbarian encampment that had gone previously unnoticed. The group of twelve or so primitive humans beat the ground with sticks and threw rocks at the tanks. I ordered the vehicles to clear the vicinity and dropped my 50 megaton warhead directly into the center of the barbarian village, incinerating them and a nine square mile radius.

I paused to look at the destruction. Without enemies, there was no need for nukes.

If we have no enemies, we have no need for nukes.

But without nukes, we might have more enemies.

The 5 Most Creepy Moments in Beatles History

2011-08-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

I really like The Beatles. Don’t get me wrong—I find their music to be innovative and enjoyable, even in their sickeningly sweet sugar pop roots. They really pushed the bar and set the standards for what a band could produce, both in songwriting ability and studio recordings.

However, the meanings of words and phrases can shift over the years. The Beatles’ discography happens to be quite extensive, and they weren’t afraid to say things that could be considered controversial at the time, so their records are a goldmine of semi-questionable language that has shifted over the years. When you factor in that 75% or more of their music is romance-oriented, this makes for quite the collection of romantic euphemisms.

Without insulting these four fantastic songwriters too much, I present to you The 5 Most Creepy Moments in Beatles History.

I Saw Her Standing There

Going all the way back to the beginning of The Beatles’ professional recording career, we find this classic song at the very beginning of their very first LP. And we don’t need to go further than the very first line to get the fifth creepiest moment in the Beatles discography.

As the song kicks into its immediate rock n’ roll groove, Paul McCartney croons this line:

“Well she was just seventeen, you know what I mean?”

No, Paul, what exactly do you mean? This could just be an innocent rhyme intended to kick off a song about a pretty girl, and Paul was only twenty years old at the time he wrote this anyway, so it’s doubtful that he’d be tried for statutory rape and forced to register as a sex offender for life according to today’s standards. However, the vague “you know what I mean?” leaves one’s mind searching for exactly what he’s implying. It's like he's elbowing you while pointing at a girl who's way too young to be looking at that way and acting like it's completely appropriate when it's clearly not.

Actually, it was not Paul, but in fact John Lennon who devised this line, saving the song from one of the most hideous opening lines for a debut album of all time. According to Paul:

I had "She was just seventeen," and then "Beauty queen". When I showed it to John, he screamed with laughter, and said "You're joking about that line, aren't you?"

The two agreed to replace the ill-conceived rhyme with the line in question, and history was made. Creepy history.

Getting Better

If the vagueness of “I Saw Her Standing There” was what made that song so disturbing, it’s the matter-of-fact tale of anger management issues related by Paul McCartney in “Getting Better” that makes it just a tad bit creepier. It comes close to the end of the immaculate and legendary Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, quite a bit further along The Beatles’ lifespan. McCartney introduces his history of anger within seconds of the song’s start:

“I used to get mad at my school,” he sings. What exactly is it, Paul, that made you so angry?

“Teachers that taught me weren’t cool,” he continues. Well, that’s reasonable. You’re not cool, so I’m angry! But at least he admits that it’s getting better all the time, right? Not quite. By the second verse, he still hasn’t learned his lesson.

“Me used to be angry young man,” he says, clearly suffering from the inability to properly form a sentence due to ignoring his uncool teachers. Again, though, he promises that his uncontrollable rage is getting better all the time—until the third verse comes, after he’s blissfully wed.

“I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved,” he matter-of-factly states. However, he reminds everyone that he’s really just misunderstood and that he promises not to do it again.

“Man, I was mean, but I’m changing my scene, and I’m doing the best that I can,” he swears, and then reminds us for the rest of the song that it's indeed getting better all the time. Sounds like the hollow promises of a serial domestic abuser to me.

Dig a Pony

By the time the Beatles had decided to “Get Back” to their roots and play some good ol’ fashioned rock music, John Lennon had done every drug in the book and fried his brain not entirely unlike the eggs in those old anti-drug PSAs. In this song from the group’s last official LP, he discreetly reveals his passion for farm animals.

“I-I-I-I-I dig a pony,” he croons, “Well, you can celebrate anything you want.” That’s good to know, John. I guess ponies are the kind of thing you might have at a birthday party, so that kind of makes sense.

“I-I-I-I-I do a road hog,” he continues, “Well, you can penetrate any place you go.” What? Umm... did you... what? Are you saying that... never mind. I don’t even want to know.

“Yes, you can penetrate any place you go! I told you so!” he shouts, as my skin begins to crawl. This song has most definitely taken a turn for the worse, and we’re only 45 seconds in.

“I-I-I-I-I pick a moon dog,” he begins, as I shut off the song.

Run For Your Life

Keeping with the themes of underage women and violent rage, this tune came at the end of the classic Rubber Soul album. John Lennon hadn’t quite lost his mind yet, but he nonetheless penned this tune of domestic abuse that not only reaches far beyond McCartney’s “Getting Better,” but is apparently written from the point of view of a delusional jealous pedophile. Eight seconds into the song, he wastes no time getting to the point.

“Well, I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man,” he admits. But that’s only the beginning. The catchy refrain says it all:

“You better run for your life if you can, little girl. Hide your head in the sand, little girl. Catch you with another man, that’s the end, little girl.”

Then George Harrison’s perky guitar jingles a few happy notes while we imagine a full-grown, hairy John Lennon running around a playground with a meat cleaver. But wait, maybe he was only kidding!

“Well, you know that I’m a wicked guy and I was born with a jealous mind,” he reminds us as he begins the second verse. Another refrain, another cooky guitar solo courtesy of Harrison while we envision screaming children scattering like pigeons from a deranged Lennon as he homes in on one small child.

“Baby, I’m determined, and I’d rather see you dead,” he viciously promises, and sings another refrain. “You better run for your life if you can, little girl.” If this doesn’t make you feel ill, you’re not interpreting it literally enough. (Lennon would later admit that this was the song he most regretted writing, taking a literal look at it himself.)

Little Child

I don’t mean to pick on John Lennon. He just chose the most awful euphemisms while writing some of his music. Sure, it wasn’t unheard of for unlikely synonyms like “baby,” “little girl,” and “child” to make it into romantic tunes of the time. It was also common for Lennon to write lullabies and silly songs for children. Judging by the title of the song, you might expect this song to fit that theme.

On the A-side of the 1963 release With the Beatles, this song was pretty early in The Beatles’ career, and was an up-tempo dance tune. McCartney admitted that it was a “filler track,” and so very little attention was given to the content of the song. If only they had thought about it just a little harder.

As was common on Beatles albums, Ringo Starr often sang one of the songs. Lennon and McCartney wrote this for him to sing, but Starr backed off from the ill-conceived subject matter to sing the much more grown-up “I Wanna Be Your Man.” I can’t blame him.

The song begins with a strong rock n’ roll backbeat and the boys waste no time getting to the lyrics:

“Little child, little child,” they sing in a hypnotic manner, “little child, won’t you dance with me?” Lennon and McCartney could be having a bit of innocent fun at a family function, but then things get worse.

“I’m so sad and loooonely,” they harmonize in a highly disturbing manner. I think it’s this line, borrowed from the song “Whistle My Love” by Elton Hayes, that really sends shivers up my spine. But the worst is yet to come.

“If you want someone to make you feel so fine, then we’ll have some fun while you’re mine, all mine,” they sing. “So come on, come on, come on!”

At this point, I’d like to clarify that I’m well aware that they’re speaking to an anonymous of-age romantic partner, but the repeated use of “little child” is just completely unnecessary, and it sends the tone of this song off in the exact opposite direction of where it was supposed to go. Regardless, they feel the need to remind us that they intend to dance with a little child, then jump into this gem:

“When you’re by my side you’re the only one. Don’t you run and hide, just come on, come on!”

The real humor here, of course, is the upbeat tempo, party atmosphere, and generally having-fun feel of the song while they sing these horrifically creepy lyrics. Just imagine for a moment: A cheruby John Lennon and a fresh-faced Paul McCartney on opposite microphones, big grins on their faces, singing these highly inappropriate words to a room full of concertgoers who all become simultaneously disgusted and walk out. Hey, I’m not the only one who feels this way!

Well, we’re only talking about a handful of songs from The Beatles’ 300+ song catalog, so their batting average is actually pretty good. There’s bound to be one or two songs that slip by that really sound like the confessions of a child molester, right?

Why are Rugs so Freakin' Expensive?

2011-07-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

I’m hoping to move in to a house in the very near future, and the house we’ve put in an offer for has hardwood floors throughout. Not a speck of carpet in the entire place.

I’ve lived my entire sheltered, suburban, new construction life with wall-to-wall carpeting, which is probably why I broke my foot from walking barefoot on concrete too much. I’ve never known a living experience in which there was a hard surface to lay on other than the kitchen or bathroom floor (not that I’ve done that too much, ha ha.)

But I’m kind of a weirdo. My computer is on the floor, and when I say “on the floor,” I mean the main case, the monitor, and the mouse and keyboard—all on the floor. The monitor doesn’t even have a stand, it just leans up against a subwoofer.

So I spend a lot of time on the floor at home, laying on my stomach to type, game, or read the news. I can’t imagine doing that on hardwood floors, so rather than get a computer desk, I’m looking to drop my life savings on area rugs. How expensive could they be?

As it turns out, I could buy an entirely new computer for the price of one rug. And I don’t need a little one. Nope, no puny 3'x5' is going to work in my living room. I need something bigger. At least 8'x10'.

One thing I noticed pretty quickly about rugs is that 9 out of 10 look like something you’d see hanging on temporary display in a gas station parking lot. They’re the overstock oriental rugs you see everywhere, and even those are expensive. I’m more of a minimalist, so I don’t want stupid fancy decorations all over the floor, and floral is out.

Mission: Find a non-oriental, non-floral 8'x10' or larger area rug without spending too much.

Unfortunately, what constitutes “too much” is impossible to determine in the rug world. That’s because it’s an industry with such wildly insane prices that your spirit is broken within minutes of shopping, and you begin to think that $350 for something your dog’s going to wipe his ass on is a “good deal.” Example:

I’ll just Google an 8'x10' contemporary rug and sort results from lowest- to highest-priced. Ooh, look at that tacky one! I’d pay $50 for that.

Click

Okay, so I can get it as low as $50. I’ll check out the Rug Stop because they also don’t charge tax and offer free shipping.

Click

Oh, really? You mean it’s not $50, it’s in fact a mere $770?

Well, let me just get out my credit card and pay $770 for this tacky-ass rug. Note that the 2'x3' is still more than $50 by about 150%.

And so it goes in the world of rug shopping. You can see by now how one’s spirit can be broken so easily. Your choices are oriental rugs, flower rugs, or paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Shaggy Raggy

When we were first looking at the house I mentioned earlier, we noticed that the current tenants have this wonderful, huge white rug made from a material I’d never heard of. While in a baby store a few weeks later I saw the material and recorded what the consumer tag said: It’s called Shaggy Raggy. Stupid name, incredible material.

They had at least an 8'x10' in their house, so I figured if I can afford to buy their house, I’ll probably be able to afford this rug, right? Couldn’t be more than $150 or so. Wrong. It’s $280 for the 5'x8', the largest size I can find. But hold up for a moment, that’s not even totally accurate, as this comment on the Bed Bath & Beyond website eloquently points out:

I realize that for rugs they round to the nearest foot, however, you vshould know that this rug is 4'7" by 7'7" - In my opinion, the absolute minimum size you could be to call it a 5'x8' rug. Since is $280, I thought I would let others know. It is a soft rug.

Thanks, nickname55. I noticed this myself when I first looked up these rugs: Rather than calling it 4.5' by 7.5', (which would be 4'6" by 7'6"), they’ve technically moved up into the 5' by 8' category (by rounding up from 4'7" by 7'7".) Isn’t that sneaky? So, overpriced, too small, and practically false advertising. How much did the current tenants pay for their magical unobtainable rug?

55" x 91" = 5005 square inches, and 96" x 120" = 11,520 square inches. If the price scales evenly, then we can assume this logic:

$280 / 5005"^2 = $.056 per square inch, so 11,520 x $.056 = $644.48. Crap.

I can’t afford $650 for a rug! Not with a $932,698,326,903 baby due in 10 weeks! So, it’s off to Ikea to buy the world’s crappiest rug. Their selection is amazingly crappy, yet modern, like my tastes. No oriental rugs there.

Without looking too long, I find a $200 rug at 9'x10'. It looks like cheap apartment carpet. Oh well, that’s what I’m used to, and it’s what I lay on already, so cheap Ikea rug it is. But still... $200? Why are rugs so expensive?

Seriously, you walk on them, spill stuff on them, and your baby drools on them if you have one, so what’s the point in paying a crapload for one? And how do they justify charging so much? I asked Jeeves. A rug maker in India responded:

Expensive is a relative term. You need to get more objective here. Being a rug manufacturer in Agra , India ; I feel that my customers (who import the rugs) charge a King;s ransom when they sell a rug made by me to the retailer, but what the retailer charges from the consumer is even more than a Kings ransom.

An oriental rug of size 8' x 10' takes upto 4-5 months and 5 weavers to make. Thats a lot of time. A 8x10 rug may have anything between 640K Knots to 1.7 million knots in it depending on its quality. Each knot is tied by hand. IF you take out the price per knot it will be much less than a cent. Each knot takes an average of 7 seconds to tie.

If you ever happen to come to Agra, call upon me and I will take you to the looms where the rugs are woven. Then you will truly come to appreciate the value of these rugs.

Thanks man, but the plane ticket to India would cost me three rugs. Don’t we live in the era of robots? I just want a machine-manufactured piece of shit that emulates carpet and can eventually be rolled up and thrown on the side of the road somewhere so I can drive by it every day as it slowly decays without thinking about the 5 weavers that dedicated 4-5 months of their lives to creating it.

Mission accomplished, I guess. I just didn't think that $200 would be "not too much." I guess I have a different view of the American Dream.

5 80s Movies that Should be Rebooted as TV Series

2011-07-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

MTV recently broke ground by creating a new series about high school life. No, wait, they always do that.

MTV recently revived a classic 80s movie and turned it into a new series about high school life. You remember Teen Wolf, right? The hilariously bad coming-of-age Michael J. Fox movie where the teenage protagonist begins morphing into a lycanthrope, and discovers that his dad deals with the same thing? You know, the really, really obvious metaphor for puberty?

Yep, they remade it. Or rather, as is the popular phrase of the moment, they “rebooted” it, and it’s taken new form as a series of episodes—but there’s very few similarities between the 1985 movie and the 2011 TV show.

Both feature a protagonist named Scott and a best friend named Stiles; Scott turns into a werewolf sometimes. Remember anything else from the movie? Gone. It’s all different. Even Scott’s last name is different now.

Taking a cue from this re-imagining, here’s five of my own suggested 80s movie reboots, updated to fit a 2011 world.

Back to the Future

Let’s stick with the Michael J. Fox theme, because he’s a pretty easy target. The 2011 TV show takes place in San Francisco. Marty, played by Michael Cera, lives in the Castro, born to a gay couple who used a surrogate mother to conceive him. Marty takes frequent trips down to M5 Industries to hang around the Mythbusters set with Jamie Hyneman.

One of Hyneman’s more interesting inventions is the flux-capacitor-equipped Prius that is capable of time travel. When the show’s not filming, Marty and Hyneman take the vehicle to Naval Air Station Alameda, the only place in San Francisco where they can get a Prius up to 88 miles per hour.

Pilot episode: Hyneman appears at Marty’s Castro townhouse, frantic and worried. Since he never shows emotion, Marty knows something’s horribly wrong. Hyneman informs Marty that his life is in danger. They travel back in time to 1985 to stop one of his dads’ ill-conceived heterosexual marriages. In a bizarre twist, Marty’s surrogate mother falls in love with him.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Might as well squeeze all the life out of the time travel theme, right? Bill and Ted (played by Alex Pettyfer and Joe Jonas, respectively) are two aspiring professional snowboarders who run a grow-op in Denver. Their plan is to get Shaun White to appear in one of their iPhone 4-shot snowboarding videos, but unfortunately, they need a totally triumphant snowboarding video to get Shaun White.

Ted’s dad works for the DEA and wants his son to quit the cannabusiness altogether. He’s planning to send his son off to a labor camp if he can’t make a profitable snowboarding video before the end of ski season. Fortunately, Rufus (Doug Benson) is sent from the future to inform the pair that they eventually bring peace to the world by being the ones who finally legalize weed.

Pilot episode: The local government wants to shut down dispensaries in Bill and Ted’s community, prompting them to use their iPad’s time-travel app to collect famous lawyers throughout history to have a debate against Harry Anslinger at the town hall meeting.

The Goonies

The Goonies are a group of pre-teen white-hat hackers split off from Anonymous and living in Astoria, Oregon. Led by an asthmatic 12-year-old named Mikey, they are facing pressure from the Secret Service to shut down their group, even though they’re just trying to expose security holes in major companies’ websites.

After finding a Power Mac in the attic and booting it up, the group discovers an email from Steve Jobs to Mikey’s contractor dad that includes blueprints for a personal underground lair beneath the campus at One Infinite Loop. Despite not knowing if the lair was ever built, the Goonies decide that this could be the ultimate security exploit if they can just get in.

Pilot episode: The Goonies discover Steve Wozniak, locked in a closet and screaming for “Baby Ruth!” Data correctly guesses a WEP key to connect to the WiFi so they can sniff traffic they think might be coming from a massive underground data center known as One-Eyed Willie.

Short Circuit

We’ll stay in Astoria for a moment. Big Dog is a protoype robot built by the UC Berkeley Robotics department, intended to be used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan to carry packs of equipment across unpredictable terrain. While on a top-secret test in Saddle Mountain State Park, the entire crew is killed by a lightning strike to Big Dog’s head, providing him with a sudden and unexplainable consciousness.

After wandering through the woods for a while, he finds himself at the apartment of animal lover Stephanie (played by Miley Cyrus) who satisfies the robot’s cravings for power by discovering a USB port in his belly. Her computer recognizes him as a storage device, and she copies documents over from his memory that reveal a torturous life condemned to the battlefield.

Pilot episode: As FBI agents come to town looking for the robot, she has to dress him up like a saint bernard to keep him from blowing his cover. Unfortunately, he can’t stop hopping around. She tells the agents that she feeds him a steady diet of Red Bull to win the Astoria Saint Bernard High-Jump dog show.

The Breakfast Club

And finally, the second reboot in a row that is courtesy of Ally Sheedy. This series features a group of five very different students who get to know each other during detention one Saturday. The show centers on the characters as they continuously knock each other up and get hammered, concealing their unlikely acquaintances from their friends.

Pilot episode: The group is tasked with collectively writing an essay to explain who they are before the end of the day. Instead, the jock hooks up with the pretty girl after beating up the nerd, and the criminal and crazy girl sit in the bathroom huffing spray paint.

How to Remove a Search Hijacker—for Free

2011-07-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

The short answer: Install and run ComboFix. Details below.

I’m usually pretty good at removing viruses and crap from my computer, and I generally avoid using anti-virus software to do it. I’ve got good reasons. First, I’m a control freak, and I can’t stand the idea of something restricting my movements on the web. I don’t even run Windows Firewall. Second, they slow down your computer, and they might just delete stuff that you don’t want them to. Third, I know the Windows Registry like a freaking maniac.

Seriously though, when you do such processor-heavy stuff like video editing or playing Bulletstorm, you don’t want some resource hog hiding in the background, ready to jump up and say stuff like “CNN.COM IS TRYING TO REFRESH ITSELF, BUT DON’T WORRY, WE CLOSED YOUR ENTIRE BROWSER. PROBLEM SOLVED!” Your online Black Ops team will wonder why you suddenly decided to stand still in the middle of a battlefield and get shot to death.

Then there’s the boot-up issue, and this is the main reason I tell people to avoid Norton Antivirus at all costs. For years I’ve nicknamed this bloated software the Black Icy Hand of Death, turning an otherwise fully-functional computer into a crawling zombie who can’t even take commands from its master, spending half its life running a series of processes on every boot to ensure the maximum protection possible. It’s like putting bars on all the windows in your house, then boarding them up, putting 20 locks on your front door and then pushing all your furniture up against it. You’ve gotta take some risks if you want some freedom.

Usually, when I suspect I’ve got a virus, my normal routine goes like this:

Start the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and look for weirdly-named processes
Google those executables to find out if they’re known viruses
If it’s a virus, search both the entire file system and the registry for that file name and delete all references to it
Reboot

This is pretty much all anti-virus software does anyway; they just go about it with a different method. Sometimes the virus isn’t listed in the processes and I’ve got to run Ad-Aware or ClamWin to have it point out the files to me, but then I’ve got to remove them manually from the file system and registry anyway. So it was an especially frustrating week when I noticed a new type of virus I’d never seen before and had no clue how to remove.

The Asshole Search Hijacker

I noticed that my normal Google searches were taking me to suspiciously amateur-looking websites. I googled the IP addresses I was being sent to and discovered that I had what is called a “search hijacker,” also known as a “Google search hijacker,” "Scour Redirect Virus," and other names. But it didn’t stop at Google. It affected Bing, too. Not that I cared about that.

And it wasn’t just Firefox. It was Internet Explorer and Chrome, too. For days I used Ask.com, and not for the usual ironic reasons, but because this search hijacker was ignoring it. I couldn’t find a process. I couldn’t find anything weird in the registry. It was baffling me.

Here’s what was happening: I would do a Google search, and normally, I could just click on results to move on to the linked website like we all do a jillion times a day, every day. But the moment I’d click that link, the URL would be replaced by a hijacked URL, linking me to one of many asshole websites. If I hovered the mouse over the link, it’d look like this:

And then, right-clicking the URL, it would immediately change to this:

For every single result. Here’s a list of IP addresses and domains that I was being redirected to (*WARNING* DO NOT VISIT ANY OF THESE URLS):

65.97.58.37
63.209.69.107
67.214.120.132
aicse.com
askthecrew.net
b00kmarks.com
bizzclick.com
cpcadnet.com
expandsearchanswers.com
fibrosearch.com
get-search-results.com
mylocalheadlines.com
scour.com
superpages.com
yellw.info

I ran ClamWin, and it didn’t find anything. I ran Ad-Aware, and it didn’t fix the problem. I then went on a free anti-virus installing spree, during which time I also used TFC (Temp File Cleaner), Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, and SUPERAntiSpyware. None of them solved the problem.

It wasn’t until I installed ComboFix, a curiously low-key program, that the problem finally went away. If you’ve got some variant of search hijacker, this should fix the problem.

Finally, the Details of How to Remove this Stupid Search Hijacker

TFC won’t harm your computer, and it may have helped solve the problem in my case since it removed 7 gigabytes of temp files. If ComboFix doesn’t solve the problem, I’d suggest running TFC first, then running ComboFix again.

So, download and install ComboFix, choosing all the standard options, and then let it run. It’ll close all your browsers without prompting you, so save anything you need before it does this. It’s all text in a box—no fancy graphics here. It could take up to an hour, but it probably won’t, and then it’ll automatically reboot your computer. When the computer boots, don’t do anything until it spits out a text file log. You might want to save that, just in case.

When you see that text file, all should be well. You no longer need to cry yourself to sleep using Ask.com for your web queries. Remember, if this doesn’t work, try running TFC, then ComboFix. Hopefully you’ll be back to normal again.

The Incredible True Story of Bat Out of Hell

2011-07-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes three people collide in a way that changes the face of music forever. Sometimes they just end up making the most overdramatic song of all time.

In 1977 an unknown, seemingly unmarketable man who insisted on being called Meat Loaf was performing in a similarly unknown, seemingly unmarketable Peter Pan-based musical called Neverland. The musical’s principal songwriter Jim Steinman had worked closely with Meat and the rest of the cast to create an over-the-top performance about youth, love, and extreme manliness. It wasn’t like the Peter Pan everyone knows so well; this version involved knives, blood, motorcycles, and electric guitars.

It was an interesting time in rock n’ roll. Operatic performances, epic songs, and fantasy imagery were popular. Queen was getting ready to release “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions.” Cheap Trick were about to drop their debut album and go on a world tour. Broadway favorite Annie opened on April 21st to immediate acclaim. The world was ready, Steinman proposed, for the “most extreme crash song of all time.”

In the 1950s and 60s, as cars became faster and more powerful, a car crash epidemic began to emerge. This resulted in dozens of pop and rock songs romanticizing the phenomenon that proved especially popular with teenagers. Steinman loved the mix of power and romance, love and tragedy. It was his destiny to pen the genre’s ultimate achievement.

One day, after an especially strong performance of Neverland, Meat Loaf and Steinman had a simultaneous epiphany.

Steinman and Meat Loaf

“Meat,” Steinman said to the overweight singer, “What if we...”

“Recorded the motorcycle song as a single?” Meat finished.

“Absolutely! It would be...” 

“THE GREATEST CRASH SONG OF ALL TIME!” they both grandly announced at once.

But they didn’t stop there. They pulled three songs from the musical and combined it with four new tracks to create Meat Loaf’s debut album. But the real story lies behind the rewriting of that crash song, a single that would become known as “Bat Out of Hell.”

The two paired up with an eccentric producer named Todd Rundgren who was skeptical of the two at first, thinking they were ridiculous theatre idiots. But after listening to Steinman’s unique beyond-description vision of power and excess, he joined in for the humor of the whole thing. Rundgren told some of his bandmates the idea for the song, and they agreed that it would be funny to record it, and then he grabbed Bruce Springsteen’s drummer and pianist to complete the musicians who would go on to write history.

As Jim Steinman assembled the musicians on the morning of the first sessions, he briefed them on what they would expect in the following hours. “You all have been chosen to participate in something so ground-breaking, so spectacular, that you’ll be remembered for the rest of time as the musicians who performed it,” he said, hands folded behind his back as he paced back in forth in the front of the studio’s control room. “This will be the apex of your careers.”

A young Max Weinberg spoke up. “Really? Me and Roy recorded Born to Run with Springsteen two years ago, and...”

“DESTINY!” Steinman shouted as he turned and glared directly in Weinberg’s direction. “It begins with dark streets, hoodlums everywhere, someone being knifed in a corner!” he excitedly described while waving his hands wildly and looking up to the ceiling. “Suddenly, a man—a real man,” he motioned in Meat Loaf’s direction, “comes riding in on the most badass Harley you’ve ever seen, with a giant hairy skull mounted in place of the windscreen.”

Meat stepped forward sheepishly with an embarrassed grin on his face, kicking the ground. “Gosh, Jim, do you think he needs to be that manly? I’m not exactly a superhero.”  

“HE WILL BE THE MANLIEST MAN OF ALL TIME!” Steinman shouted, unable to keep froths of saliva from being projected out of his mouth. His eyes began to roll back in his head, but eventually settled back into position. “Let’s do a take!”

The band burst forth an explosion of sound lead by a frantic piano and played nearly two minutes of instrumental music before Meat joined in on the vocals. He set the initial tone of the song, describing a dirty, dark city full of dangerous characters:

“The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling way down in the valley tonight. There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye and a blade shining oh so bright. There's evil in the air and there's thunder in the sky and a killer's on the bloodshot streets. And down in the tunnel where the deadly are rising, oh, I swear I saw a young boy down in the gutter, he was starting to foam in the heat.”

The recording stopped. “Jim, are you sure these are the lyrics?” Meat asked.

Steinman calmly walked over to the vocal booth and looked in at him. “Meat,” he softly cooed, “You’ve just got to trust me, okay? We’re about to make history.” He then walked back into the control room, and with his back to the window, punched himself in the side of the head three times, took a deep breath, and turned around. “Let’s try that again!”

Rundgren

As the band played a second take, Rundgren sat back on a couch with his feet propped up on a table, laughing to himself.

“What’s so funny, Todd?” Steinman sharply inquired.

Rundgren sat up and leaned forward, removing the sunglasses from his face. “It’s too much, JIm,” he responded. “No one’s going to buy this record. It’s just too ridiculous.” 

“People come to Neverland. What makes you think they won’t buy the greatest crash song of all time?”

“Okay, man, do you what you will. Just remember what I said.”

The band blew through ten more takes before the late afternoon approached. Steinman just wasn’t quite getting the feel he wanted from the song. It wasn’t loud enough, big enough, or remotely as epic as he had hoped. Steinman called it quits for the the day and sent the band home. He asked Meat and Rundgren to stay behind.

“You know what the song needs?” he said. The two sighed and shook their heads.

“A boy’s choir right when Meat starts singing. I think that would add the level of beauty and innocence that we’re looking for.”

Rundgren spewed water out of his nose and jumped to his feet coughing. “What? A boy’s choir? Isn’t this already crazy enough?”

“I kinda like it,” Meat Loaf quietly chimed in.

“Yes, a real boy’s choir. Let’s not do any weird vocal tricks or tape effects, let’s bring in an entire choir and have them sing during the section where Meat first comes in.”  

“That’s not going to happen,” Rundgren asserted.

“Well why not?” Steinman asked. “There’s nothing in this world more beautiful than the sound of twenty boy sopranos singing,” he said as he began dreamily waltzing himself around the room with his eyes closed, humming quietly to himself. Meat and Rundgren looked at each other.

I think he's crazy, Rundgren mouthed to the obese singer.

“Look, let’s worry about that later. We’ve got a lot of post production to do anyway, and we’re already at close to four minutes by the time we get to the end of the first chorus anyway, so we’re going to want to wrap it up soon,” he said aloud.

“But that’s just when the bike is first introduced!” Steinman protested. “The story’s only getting started.”

Rundgren looked at him, disappointed. “Look, let’s just go home and regroup tomorrow.”

They split up and, took another crack at the song the next morning, moving into the second verse where Meat sang about the motorcycle’s introduction.

“I'm gonna hit the highway like a battering ram on a silver black phantom bike. When the metal is hot and the engine is hungry and we're all about to see the light,” he belted out over the roar of the band.

Steinman stood in the control room, banging his head furiously, tears flying onto the mixing board from his face. “Yes, YES, YES!!!” he shouted, “THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER!”

Meat Loaf put his full soul into the lyrics as he progressed through the verse.

“GET TO THE PART ABOUT THE DAMNING!” Steinman shouted through the glass.

“And I know that I’m damned if I never get out, and maybe I’m damned if I do. But with every other beat I got left in my heart you know I'd rather be damned with you. If I gotta be damned you know I wanna be damned, dancing through the night with you.”

“OH MY GOD THIS IS SO GOOD!” Steinman shrieked with incredible furiousness.

“If I gotta be damned you know I wanna be damned, gotta be damned you know I wanna be damned, gotta be damned you know I wanna be damned, dancin’ through the night, dancin’ through the night, dancin’ through the night with you!”

“GAaaAAAaAAHHH!!!” Steinman shouted as he fell to the floor and began openly sobbing. “That was... the most amazing... thing I have ever experienced,” he quietly whispered. Two shoes appeared in front of his face. He looked up to see Rundgren towering over him as he lay underneath the control panel.

“You ruined a good take with your shouting,” he said. “We were picking you up in the vocal mic. Just chill, baby. We gotta get through this song, and it’s already beyond what most radio stations will play. We haven’t even hit a second chorus yet.”

They worked into the later afternoon to perfect the second chorus to the high standard of Steinman’s expectations of ultimate epicness, with the end of this chorus seamlessly moving into a powerful bridge with a sudden, jarring ritard.

“Then like a sinner before the gates of heaven I’ll come crawling on back to you,” Meat Loaf crooned. Steinman stopped the recording and sat back on the couch, weeping. Rundgren walked into the studio.

“Is he okay?” Roy Bittan asked.

“Yeah, he does this all the time,” Meat Loaf confirmed. Everyone waited patiently for the eccentric songwriter to get his wits back together to continue beyond the bridge, but he never came out of his sobbing bundle. The recording session ended for the day.

Finally, Rundgren entered the control room again to reason with Steinman. “What’s the problem, man?” he asked as he began to try a different approach with this clearly tortured genius.

Between gasps of breath, Steinman finally began to become intelligible again. “It needs...” he began. The sobs choked out his words.

“What? What does it need? More guitars?” Rundgren asked.

“No... it needs a crash, but I don’t want to see this glorious man die,” he softly revealed. Rundgren cocked his head to the side and looked directly into Steinman’s face.

“Are you shitting me?” he asked. “We’re almost six minutes in and you want to do a crash now?” he angrily shouted.

“I have an idea. Let me think about it tonight and we’ll start again tomorrow.”

In the morning, Steinman arrived slightly hung over but fully ready to work. He assembled the entire band and asked Meat to come stand next to him.

“I want you all to imagine this,” he began. “Our protagonist is riding his phantom bike with its skull windscreen’s hair flapping in the wind. He’s going fast. Faster than you can imagine.” He looked up to the ceiling.

“Faster than any boy’s ever gone before.”

The band looked around at each other. Meat, generally a pretty easy-going guy, became defensive.

“Wait, this song keeps going? What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the crash,” Steinman responded. “And he never sees the sudden curve until it’s way too late. He’ll lay torn and twisted at the foot of the burning bike, but that’s not all. Meat’s got the lyrics; everyone else just play the music.”

Everyone headed back into the studio. “Todd, I need the sounds of a motorcycle in this section. Can you handle that?”

Rundgren looked at him as if he was crazy. “You want me to bring a motorcycle in here and record it? I think we might all die.”

“No no no NO! Use your creativity, man! We need a freaking motorcycle! It’s a MOTORCYCLE CRASH!”

The band struck up again and Meat took to narrating the story.

“I can see myself tearing up the road faster than any other boy has ever gone,” he read off the lyric sheet.

“Yes! Feel the speed!” Steinman shouted.

“And I never see the sudden curve until it's way too late,” Meat continued.

“Feel the danger!” a frenzied Steinman interjected as the music barreled on.

“And I never see the sudden curve 'til it's way too late!” Meat screamed.

Steinman abruptly halted the recording and turned to Rundgren.

“Todd! We need that motorcycle NOW!” he demanded.

Rundgren sighed, walked into the studio and plugged in his guitar. “Cue up the bridge,” he said. The engineer rolled the tape back and armed a channel. “Hit it,” he said.

Holding down the tremolo until the strings were literally hanging off of the guitar, he struck a low note and whipped the tremolo bar up and down. His guitar growled the sounds of a powerful bike revving up its engine and accelerating, screaming directly into a guitar solo.

“OH MY GOD! THIS IS PURE GOLD!” he could see Steinman mouthing through the control room window. Man, I hope his voice doesn’t come through on this track. I really want to just do this once, he thought.

Meat blinked his eyes. He couldn’t believe what was happening. With no rehearsal, Rundgren had just spewed forth the greatest guitar solo of all time, and he did it directly out of the emulated sounds of a phantom bike. When the solo was done, everyone stood in silence for a few seconds.

“Was that good?” Rundgren asked.

Everyone erupted into cheers. The applause lasted for several minutes as Steinman fainted, Weinberg catching him on the way down. The entire band gave him the thumbs up to come back in for the playback.

“Holy crap, how is that possible?” bass played Kasim Sulton said to him as he patted him on the back. They listened to it and decided it was worth pushing on beyond the eight-minute mark.

Steinman came back to full consciousness. “Meat, we’ve no time to lose. You’ve got that lyrics sheet, right?”

Meat Loaf nodded.

“Get in there! You know what to do!”

The band piled back into the studio and prepared for the most tear-jerking moment in rock n’ roll history. In a quiet lull in the song, Meat sang the tender words.

“Then I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun, torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike,” he sang, shedding a single tear.

“And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell.”

Rundgren got up off of the couch with a mesmerized stare and stood with his face pressed up against the glass, hands on the mixer.

“And the last thing I see is my heart, still beating, breaking out of my body and flying away—like a bat out of hell!”

Steinman slapped himself in the face to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. “More! Bigger!” he shouted.

“Then I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun!”

Weinberg’s eyes shut and he grit his teeth as he struck the drums with maximum force.

“Torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike!”

One of Sulton’s strings popped as he struck it with his thumb harder than he’d ever played the bass before.

“And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell. And the last thing I see is my heart! Still beating...” Meat Loaf restrained himself as he built up to the song’s climax.

“Still beating...” he continued, while everyone looked around the room anxiously.

“Oh, breakin’ outta my body, and flyin’ awaaaaaaay... like a bat out of hell!! Like a bat out of hell!! Like a bat out of hell!!”

Steinman and Rundgren turned and grabbed each other in a triumphant embrace. The engineer sat frozen, unable to concentrate on the mixer. Bittan banged his head as he smashed his hands down on the piano keys. Meat Loaf delivered the final notes.

“LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL!!!! LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL!!! LIKE A BAT OUT OF HEEEEEEEEEEEEEELL!!!!!!!”

Everyone collapsed to the floor except Sulton and Bittan, who held it together just long enough to finish the epilogue of the song. As they played the last notes and the song came to a close, no one spoke or moved.

Finally the engineer shut his open jaw and stopped the tape reel. “I think that’ll do, guys,” he said through the studio monitors.

No one spoke as they left the studio. They knew what they had done. There was nothing to be said.

The single failed miserably on release.

Thirty-four years later, the album Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 43 million copies, solidifying it as the fifth-best-selling album ever. There’s something to be said about creating the most epic crash song of all time.

This story is factual to the best of my knowledge and is therefore proclaimed as “true.” Any embellishments are added purely for satirical purposes. This story used the following references with the purpose of being as accurate as possible:

Classic Albums: Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell
Jim Steinman's Bat Out of Hell
Neverland by Jim Steinman
RIAA: Sales data for "Bat Out of Hell"
Songmeanings: Meat Loaf - "Bat Out of Hell"
The Julia Child of Rock and Roll
To Hell and Back: An Autobiography by Meat Loaf
Youtube: Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

Google Circles will Breed a New Type of Vanity

2011-07-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

Google+ is rapidly gaining users at an unprecedented swiftness. But as so many make the mass exodus to the newest social network, they know the routine: Pick a profile picture, write some snappy commentary about yourself, and then hunt down everyone you know. Google+ makes this even easier by using your Facebook connections (if you're signed in to Facebook) to suggest people you know, and by raiding your Gmail account (if you have one.) But making connections on GP is slightly different than FB.

With the previous social network kings—Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster—users would make friend requests. These connections amounted to a mutual acknowledgement which resulted in a public announcement of the friendship. If a user had a person in their friends list, you could definitely find the opposite to be true as well. Any unanswered friend requests remained private, invisible to everyone but the requester and the requestee. Furthermore, friend requests could be denied, killing off the attempted connection entirely.

Facebook altered this process a little bit by allowing the originator of a pending friend request to see (but not comment on) the status updates of the target. The result of this was the potential for hundreds of people to "follow" one person without the favor being returned.

Things are a little different with Google+. "Friend requests" don't even exist; rather, people add each other to their "circles." This means that anyone can follow anyone else, and the person being followed will be notified of this. Our instinct, when we get these notifications, is to "accept the request," but the action button that is provided leads the user to follow them as well. We're not actually required to return the favor.

In this way, Facebook's model of allowing the requester to see updates from the target exists, but in a much more public way. GP's equivalent of "friend requests" is entirely public. There's no way to stop them.You can't remove yourself from their circles. You can block them from seeing your content, which allows you a little bit of control over who sees your content, but you have no control over that number.

What you end up with is a pair of categories that shows up on your profile:

People in your circles
People who've added you to their circles

However, these categories translate into:

People you think are cool
People who think you're cool

Here comes a new type of popularity contest! On other social networks, the first category would be a number that would symbolize mutual friendship; the second number would indicate unrequited friend requests, but would never be visible to anyone but yourself. Ideally, this number should be roughly equal. Most of us would like to think that we're interested in approximately the same number of people that are interested in us.

But for the vain, this will become an indicator of popularity. The ratio of one to the other will be a quick way for people to show how sought-after they are. For example, check out the ratio of Ben Parr, editor of Mashable:

Obviously, there's a lot of people that know who he is, because nearly 13,000 people want to follow him. But Ben just can't keep up with 13,000 people, so he's only added a more intimate tally of 1,018. His ratio is roughly 1:13. Clearly, he's a popular guy.

More depressing is when the ratio goes the other way, which is where my account is sitting as I write this. Well, it's not so bad: It's 11:9, and that's mostly because I've invited a few people who haven't signed up yet. But if you're following 1,000 people and only 100 people want to follow you, your ratio is 10:1, and you begin to look desperate. At least, that's the way egomaniacs will view it.

Fortunately, Google's thought ahead to help you avoid embarassment. You can choose to not display these categories on your profile page, thus returning the unreciprocated circle-add to the shadows. Clearly though, there will be a lot of people who will be proud of their high ratio, especially since GP doesn't limit followers to 5,000 like Facebook does. I suspect we'll see a new form of vanity take shape in the coming months, with users bragging about their "Google+ ratio."

Burn Your High School Diploma

2011-07-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of superstock.com; could you tell?

It's no secret: Higher education becomes more and more prevalent each year. That's why your high school diploma is worth about as much as a bag full of soda cans.

We've entered a period of somewhat exponential growth in education over the past decade. Where a college degree used to be the key to success, a Master's degree is often seen as necessary. Not all fields of study have reached this level, but it's coming. We have the highly competitive job market to blame for this.

Back when our grandparents were attending public school, many of them dropped out before they even got to high school. They'd go to work for friends and family building a skillset that would take them far in their careers and allow them to provide for an entire (sometimes enormous) family. That's right—it was normal to be a successful seventh-grade dropout.

A limited job market influenced an evolution in education during the next generation. Breakthroughs in science as well as higher standards for language and historical knowledge encouraged many teenagers to push through high school to get their diplomas. This was seen as an easy, logical, and beneficial way to have an advantage over the competitors in the job pool. It also meant that high school dropouts had to take the less desireable jobs—if they could even find them.

Another wave of job scarcity pushed a higher percentage of those high school graduates to go to college. Even a portion of college education was viewed favorably by many employers, but to have the ultimate advantage, a student needed to obtain a Bachelor's degree. Because of the overwhelming number of job applicants with these degrees, many job listings began to weed out those with less education by stating up front that the Bachelor's was a minimum requirement.

Throughout all these years, there have always been college graduates. Doctors always needed to push through a massive amount of schooling to be able to practice medicine, and for good reason; mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and other scientists have always needed the intense studying to grasp these complicated and sometimes abstract concepts. But for those not in the medical or scientific communities, higher education was never really necessary until the push for the Bachelor's degree.

Poor economies and the barren job markets that generally accompany them are typically characterized by a high rate of re-enrollment. This is specifically because those who are unemployed or are seeking a higher-paying job need something to one-up their competition, or they need to learn a new skill set. The damaged economy of the past few years has upped the ante yet again.

Now many disciplines—such as Psychology—practically require an applicant to have a Master's degree to be considered for a decent position. Since a typical college career that results in this level of qualification lasts about seven years, we're now talking about an average education length of twenty years—roughly a quarter of a person's life. Think about that: To get a decent job in Psychology, you need to spend 25% of your life preparing for it.

So what's a high school diploma worth? Pretty much nothing. No employers list it as a requirement. It doesn't get you a discount at the grocery store. The only thing it's used for is allowing you to be considered to enter college. When it comes down to it, graduating high school is basically just a ticket to go to college—but even that doesn't guarantee you'll be accepted.

However, there are plenty of jobs that don't require higher education whatsoever. I'm not just talking about janitors and bus drivers, though these occupations are entirely necessary and an integral part of society. Many hands-on vocations can result in high-paying jobs, but if a dropout can secure a position in a field without the degree, whether via nepotism, charisma, or an impressive grasp on the important material, they might not ever need a degree. Actually, ten years in a career is roughly equivalent to a Bachelor's degree anyway.

Therefore, if an individual is fully aware that they'll never go to college, there's no real reason to finish high school. It would be more beneficial to drop out as quickly as possible and begin focusing on a career. If a student quits school at 16, they can have a decade of job experience under their belt by the age of 26. By this point they've already learned just about everything public school has to offer them anyway. The final two years of high school are basically just college preparatory, and the information that doesn't get retained for later use in college is effectively forgotten. Remember anything from senior English? I don't.

Yep, a high school degree doesn't really mean anything, which is a shame because just living through those four years qualifies you for a medal. I guess it's at least worth the satisfaction of knowing that you completed that level of schooling, but it's definitely not helpful in the job hunt. And when the stakes rise again and we all need doctorates to find work, you'll find yourself wondering: What's the worth of a high school degree? Not a damn thing.

The Rise and Reign of Awesome

2011-07-14T07:10:00.000-07:00

Some slang terms come and go. This is the story of the one that wouldn’t die.

In the early 1960s, a new faction of counter-culture began to emerge. This was an era of youth in revolt who were actively seeking to reject everything their parents stood for. They adopted radically different clothing, music, and philosophies; they experimented with substances, new and old; but very much like every generation before them, they developed their own slang terminology.

Slang has always been a way for the youth to stay one step ahead of the older generations, a sort of “code language” so that information can be passed between the young while leaving everyone else completely ignorant. When those slang terms begin to be used by the older generations, they tend to die off. This is partially because the code is no longer secret, but it’s also because no one wants to hear this stuff coming out of their parents’ mouths.

So when the word “awesome” took on an altered definition during the cultural revolution, it was no surprise. Its new meaning was very similar to the previous centuries-old use, but with a youthful approach: Instead of meaning “profoundly awe inspiring,” it was basically reduced to a casual, “impressive,” or “very good.” Teens and young adults across the United States adopted this new sense for the word and used it liberally—sometimes merely as an interjection.

By the early 1980s, “awesome” was still being used by younger and older generations alike. It had outlived the lifespan of the typical slang term, but rather than seeing a reduction in use, it maintained a more-or-less steady existence in the lexicon of the American public. However, as this decade rolled forth, the word grew. It became the go-to term for seeming youthful and cool and selling everything related to 80s culture.

The more bizarre or re-defined a slang term is, the shorter its lifespan. This is why nonsensical words like “gadzooks” never last. It’s why “rufus” from Never Been Kissed didn’t actually catch on. But it’s also why words like “radical,” and “tubular” died off in the 1980s (both sharing a slang definition with “awesome,” but with the former’s actual meaning being “deviating from the norm,” and the latter meaning, “tube-shaped.”) The startling longevity of “awesome” can be entirely attributed to its adoption as a slang term that actually means what it says.

When the 90s arrived, no one actually expected it to disappear. It was a tried-and-true descriptor that began to take shape for use in ironic situations and casual conversation. It was no longer something that anyone paid attention to; rather, it was just a normal component of speech. It seemingly graduated from slang to proper language.

However, something spectacular happened within the past few years. From its steady use through the previous two decades, “awesome” suddenly began to grow again. Starting in early 2008, the word began to pop up with increasing frequency. By 2010, the word was experiencing incredible growth in popularity. Social networking most likely played a large part in this, but there’s something more here: Awesome became a philosophy.

The word became the definition for a worldview in which certain objects, experiences, or individuals feature a significant level or combination of positive excess, power, unattainability, rarity, and/or supernaturality. Countless images popped up across the Internet depicting the visual descriptions of what “awesome” is, and then marketing agencies caught on and began utilizing the viewpoint to sell their products to a young demographic. Here’s a few examples of “awesome” in marketing, starting with the Old Spice guy commercial series:

Taking a cue from the success of these ads, Dairy Queen began pushing their own similar commercials featuring the, uh, Dairy Queen guy:

Both commercials reek of a specific brand of attitude and combine an over-the-top situation to imply that their product is, of course, “awesome.” Here's another one, which proudly proclaims its awesomeness in explicit terms:

This trend’s not going away any time soon, if Google Trends is a good indicator:

It looks like we might just be in another burst of activity in the lifespan of this word, but it’s not going away any time soon. We can love it, lament it, or ignore it, but the fact remains that it’s an integral part of our culture at this point. However, I’d avoid overusing it if I were you, because there are dozens of perfectly appropriate synonyms just waiting for their chance to describe your experiences.

Can't Sign In to Gmail Business and Personal Accounts at the Same Time? Here's the Fix

2011-07-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

My company uses Gmail to power its internal email. This is incredibly useful because we don’t have to moderate our own mail system, and everyone’s using the same setup from within a browser. We can all stay signed in all day and send messages to each other, and we get to use our company’s domain name in our addresses instead of “X@gmail.com”.

I also use my own personal email account because I don’t want to mix everything business-related and personal. This way my business account remains spam-free while my personal account—which is now my Google+ profile as well—can do its own thing.

I keep both of them open within the same browser window right next to each other so I can see emails come in on the tab all day long. This increases my productivity, multi-tasking, and allows me to keep up with both business and personal affairs instantaneously.

But then I came in this morning and I was signed out of my business account. Signing in sent me to a window that said this:

Your X@X account now works more like a full Google Account.

It then signed me out of my personal account. So I signed back in, and it said that I was already signed into the other, and gave me the option of switching accounts:

You are trying to access Gmail with the following Google Account:
X@X.com

However, you are already signed in as:
X2@gmail.com

You can either cancel this request, or switch to a new Google Account to access Gmail.

This is not what I wanted to do. However, I had heard that you could could tweak a Gmail setting to allow signing in with multiple accounts, so I found that setting, enabled it, and figured I was in the clear. Not so. I’ve been having this problem all morning. As soon as I sign into one, the other signs out. Seems I can only have one or the other open at any point. Not a good move at all.

In order to get around this and have both accounts open at the same time, I had to use two different browsers, with one account open in each window. Fortunately, I have the monitor space to run them side-by-side, but not everyone has this option.

However, after messing around with it for quite a while and getting frustrated, I believe I’ve finally figured it out. I had to enable multiple sign-in on both accounts in order for them to work simultaneously. Here’s how to do it:

Complete these steps for all accounts that will be open simultaneously.

Click your account name in the upper-right corner of the window and choose Account Settings.

Under Security, there is a setting that says Multiple sign-in. If it says On, this account is set up already. If it says Off, click Edit.

Click the radio button next to On and select all four checkboxes. Click Save.

That’s all there is to it. If you’ve been having this problem, everything should be back to normal as soon as you change this setting on all your accounts.

Google usually has their user’s experience in mind when they roll out new features, and they must acknowledge that many people want to keep their business and personal emails separate while keeping both open at the same time within the same browser. Hopefully soon they’ll figure out a way to make the two work in harmony a bit more efficiently.

[UPDATE 7/16]: Google has apparently tried to defuse this situation a bit by auto-enabling the "multiple accounts" setting when signing into a second Gmail account. You need to have the feature enabled on a currently logged-in account for this to work, but when you reach the signup page, you'll be given this notice:

Notice the line in red that says "Multiple sign-in will be turned on for the account you're signing in to." Hopefully this helps clear up the confusing alterations to this policy change. Just be aware that you're allowing Gmail to be signed in to two different accounts simultaneously, so don't get your accounts mixed up.

Also, Twitter Kills Mystique

2011-07-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding like a bitter Twitter-basher, we’ve got to acknowledge that the medium is not for everyone. The other day I talked about how comedians generally don’t fare well in their chosen profession via the tweet because they’re expected to entertain their followers. I said that Twitter works best for celebrities when used for live updates (mass dissemination of information) and as a “virtual autograph” (fans interacting with the famous). However, this doesn’t mean that this approach works with all types of celebrities.

For comedians, being on the audience’s level can work. We often identify with people we see as bearing many similarities to us, which is what comedians want. They want us to imagine ourselves in their shoes in order for us to understand their jokes. This is one of the reasons that comedians can be famous without being hyper-attractive. Telling jokes through Twitter may not generally succeed, but interacting with the fans and informing them of current news can be really useful for them.

We see the same thing with many actors and musicians in tabloid magazines. (Look, they drink water—just like us!) But they’re not just like us. They wear crazy expensive clothes. They don’t really have to worry about their car payments and stuff. They’ve each got an uncountable number of stalkers. Actually, they deal with tons of things the average person doesn’t have to, no matter how much we want to believe that we’re just like them.

But there’s a certain type of person whose persona works because they’re mysterious. I’ll throw into this category anyone who seems bizarre, dangerous, or can in any way be considered “Larger than life.” Whether they know it or not, they’ve worked hard to preserve the mystery that surrounds them. It makes them seem untouchable. But more importantly, it makes people want to know more about them. It’s intriguing.

This is one of the reasons that newcomers to music, acting, or practically any other field are exciting: We don’t know who they are, so the possibilities of what they produce could be endless. Before even finding out, we make our own—often fanciful—assumptions of what the person is like. So when someone pops up onto the scene, and there’s something about them that grabs our attention, we keep watching, waiting for something to happen. There’s got to be something to spark interest, but the mystery will keep it going.

So when a newcomer who is mysterious appears out of nowhere, demands our attention, and limits the amount that we can know about them, it’s a highly successful business model. But when that person becomes ultra-transparent, it loses a bit of excitement. For some celebrities, this is perfectly fine. A-list movie stars will do a hundred talk shows for each movie they release and post to Twitter all day. We pay attention because they’re either hyper-attractive or really good at acting/playing music/etc., or both.

A good example of the mystery-to-transparency transition is Lady Gaga. When she first appeared on the scene, no one knew anything about her except for what we could gather from her music videos and albums. We didn’t know her real name. We didn’t know which of her looks was really her. We didn’t know her thoughts, feelings, passions, or anything beyond the lyrics of her music. Her strange, bizarre, possible dangerous persona grabbed the attention of a huge audience.

This entertainer has become somewhat of a poster child for social interaction. She has an extremely popular Twitter account that she updates several times a day; she appears in press conferences plugging Polaroid; she’s done a hundred talk shows, and we know all about her. Pictures from high school surfaced, along with her real name. But it’s the Twitter account that really lets the general public peer into her personal life, like this most recent post:

My performance+cooking show appearance on SMAP SMAP is airing now in Japan. Kawaii Monsters! Tonight running around Sydney in my OXFORDs. X

Look, she’s just like us! She’s going to be doing stuff in a place! Ok, so this is partially a plug for an appearance and a quirky bit of minor daily detail. But what about older posts?

Will be tweeting soon how little monsters can get involved to mobilize social justice. NY State needs us, and the time for change is now.

Look, she has political views! Now we know even more about her. Now we know that she’s not some weird blood-thirsty alien with musical talent who would rip your throat out if you met her. Which is actually bad for her image, believe it or not. The mystery is gone.

Let’s talk about somebody that we hardly know anything about: Elly Jackson, the singer of La Roux. People don’t really know a whole lot about her. Some of them don’t even know her gender. Actually, a lot of people think her name is "La Roux." There seems to be a lot of interest in the band, even if very few people actually know who they are. Here’s how she feels about the whole deal:

This new generation of pop stars are killing their careers with the social networking thing. They're promoting their careers in the short run, but in the long run they're telling people way too much about themselves and making themselves too accessible.

I'm fascinated by artists such as Prince and David Bowie. Neither have Twitter profiles, because they're not stupid enough to be on Twitter. Prince doesn't like to have pictures on the Internet, let alone interviews. That's not by mistake or because he's an arsehole. It's because he knows the intrigue and mystery need to be upheld.

I used to go see bands play at a dirty club in Atlanta called the Masquerade. In my teens, this was unbearably exciting. There were no band websites yet, because hardly anyone used the web. The music wasn’t featured on radio morning shows or MTV because it was too obscure or extreme. Everything I knew about the people who made that music came directly from the albums—music and included booklet. Often, an album wouldn’t even include pictures of the performers, so I’d have no idea what they looked like. The band (or more accurately, record label) was under complete control of their image.

These concert tickets would always say “NO CAMERAS” as well, probably because the bands wanted so much control over their image. No one had a phone in their pocket yet, so it was a lot easier to enforce the no-camera rule back then. The end result was that I had no idea what to expect from a live show except the music I knew and loved. The excitement of seeing those people in person was overwhelming. The potential of meeting them seemed like an impossibility. The little bits of speech we’d get from the lead singer in-between songs was pure gold. After the show, the band would head “backstage,” a concept that conjured images of incredible excess surrounded by lavish luxury.

Years later my own band played on that same stage, and I got to go “backstage.” It was a plain dirty room with one couch, barely large enough for eight people to stand. There was no bathroom. There was a hole in the floor. The walls were painted not green, but bright orange. The illusion was partially ruined.

It was even worse when I met Peter Tagtgren, lead singer of metal band Hypocrisy. I pictured him as this strange supernatural being who spoke with a shrieking demonic voice, using eloquent archaic european terminology. As it turns out, he was just like me, which was worse than getting punched in the throat.

People always say, “Never meet your heroes.” They’re probably right. Twitter brings us one step closer to the day-to-day activities of these mysterious people. Even if you don’t end up hating them after meeting them, you’ll probably just be bored.

Why Twitter isn't Funny

2011-07-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

What would celebrities do without Twitter? This communication channel brings unprecedented transparency to a famous person’s life while allowing them to maintain a safe distance from the crazies. They (or their team of publicists) can spew forth their personal news such as projects or live performances, give the people random musings, or—as most comedians choose—use the platform to deliver jokes. The problem with this is that Twitter just isn’t funny. But why?

The one-liner is dead. If you’re going to tell a joke in 140 characters or less, it’s going to be a one-liner. There have been a lot of comedians over the years who were excellent at telling this style of joke, and nearly all of them hit their peak before the current social media era. Actually, this is a joke style that thrived in the mid-20th century and waned after cable TV came about. There just aren’t that many comedians that choose the one-liner style anymore, and yet this is exactly the approach that they’re pigeonholed into using when they try to make people laugh with Twitter.

The one-liner greats—Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, and the King of One-Liners, Henny Youngman—have all passed on. Modern comedians generally choose a more casual, often offensive route. Though these comedians were sometimes known for their shocking subject matter, the focus of the humor wasn’t to gross-out, disturb, or make the audience feel uncomfortable. There’s only a handful of people these days who can deliver a one-liner without it sounding like an old-fashioned cheesy gag.

Shocking the audience is a more sensitive subject these days. Lenny Bruce and not-as-good comics like Andrew Dice Clay may have broken ground by shocking their audiences and pushing the envelope, but they did it in a closed setting: A nightclub, a movie, a comedy record, etc. In all these cases, they knew what they were doing, how it would be received, and they had a team of people working to preserve that person’s image. Audiences in those times experienced a widespread cultural shift weren’t surprised when they heard something offensive, especially before the more recent push for a more politically correct atmosphere.

Thanks to the Internet, broadcasting is no longer a one-way conversation. Couple this two-way model of communication with mobile phones that can connect to the Internet from everywhere and you have a broadcast device in every pocket. This allows for immediate public reactions by just about everyone to voice their opinions while their comments are still fresh in their minds. Now, if a comedian pisses someone off, the audience can tell everyone they know all about it before they have time to forget or calm down.

Text kills the comedian’s voice. The way a comedian tells a joke is every bit as important as the joke itself. Indeed, “Timing is everything,” and most people don’t have good timing, so when they read a joke, it ends up not being nearly as funny as it would have been if the pro had said it aloud. Sure, comedians can write successful books, but that medium usually involves a much longer format that provokes thought and utilizes long setups in order to reach a different kind of funny. When you reduce that joke to 140 characters or less, it’s all about the wordplay and the way it’s delivered. Since most people aren’t comedians, it really comes down to just the wordplay when Twitter’s the delivery method. And most one-liners, let’s face it, just aren’t that good. That’s why you have to tell a million of them.

So let’s look at some Twitter accounts. These are people who are supposedly funny, right?

My mother told me that if i didn't stop touching the CN Tower everyone in Canada would go blind. -Jim Carrey

I like a girl with a little junk in her trunk. To be clear, not a big ass but small clumps of debris in her suitcase. -Dane Cook

Eclipse gum: guaranteed to make your bad breath smell like minty bad breath! -Sarah Silverman

Wait, at the end of "Shout", the singer tells everyone to, "Take it easy." Hey asshole, you're the one that riled us up. -Patton Oswalt

Why is it whenever someone says, “If you know what I mean” I always wish I didn’t. If you know what I mean. -Jim Gaffigan

If these people are comedians, why aren't these tweets very funny? There’s a good reason for that. It’s because they’re human. They’re just like you and me. They post random stuff to their Twitter accounts just like we post our random crap that no one wants to read. The reason it comes off sounding like a joke is because we expect them to be telling jokes, and they’re used to telling jokes, so it’s sort of phrased like a joke, even if it’s not intended to be one. With the exception of Dane Cook who tries to vomit ten one-liners a day onto Twitter, everyone else is pretty much just relating a daily musing without trying too hard to be funny. Hey, you wanted to peer into their personal lives, right? That’s why you followed them on Twitter, isn’t it? Well, you got it, and it turns out that it’s not actually that funny.

So then you’ve got other comedians who are actually intending to use their Twitter accounts to deliver jokes, but without any filter. They’re restricted to the one-liner, relying on the reader to capture the correct tone, inflection, and timing. Add to that comedians who have a history of being highly offensive and making tasteless jokes that were previously tolerable in comedy clubs who are now dropping one-liners on the people’s medium. For example, this series of Japanese tsunami-related jokes by Gilbert Gottfried cost him his job as the Aflac duck:

I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, "They'll be another one floating by any minute now."

In the past, we’d just yell, “Too soon! Too soon!” and shake it off, but now that everyone can instantly communicate their shock—directly to the comedian, even—the outrage just snowballs after something like this. Gilbert Gottfried’s one-liners sank because the audience is too sensitive, because we’re not looking at his squinty eyes and hearing his irritating voice as he says them, and, as mentioned before, one-liners just aren’t that funny anymore. How is a comedian supposed to thrive on Twitter?

They don’t have to. They can use Twitter for what it was originally intended for: Updates and communication. They’ll tell people when and where to hear them being funny. Talking one-on-one with fans through Twitter is the new autograph, so it’s totally worth their time. But they don’t need to utilize that space to be hilarious. They have dozens of other channels to accomplish that. Here’s what Louis CK had to say in an interview with CNN:

I'm not motivated to entertain people through Twitter, so just by having Twitter and not saying anything, I make people mad. People write me, and they're like, "Why don't you fucking entertain me?" Or they go, "Stop promoting yourself and say something funny." But I'm not a Twitterer! It's not my profession. It's not what I do. I just opened a Twitter account to tell people what's going on, and once in a while I get an impulse to say something.

We should all do ourselves a favor and stop expecting Twitter to be funny. We follow these people because we want to peer into their personal lives, not because we expect this to be a method by which to be entertained. Just check their updates, find out how you can hear their jokes, and then go to them. Don’t just sit around waiting for the jokes to come to you.

[UPDATE 7.17]: Jerry Seinfeld opened a Twitter account a few days ago. Fifth tweet:

Going to Maine today to pick up kid from camp. Why did Nazis call it Concentration Camp? So misleading in so many ways.

Perhaps Twitter just died?

When Will Internet TV be as Good as Cable TV?

2011-07-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

There’s no doubt about it: Online television is the way of the future. We move closer to it every day. From high-technology content providers like Netflix and Hulu to network websites that stream their own content, more and more people are ditching traditional television in favor of these more net-savvy formats.

It’s an inevitable evolution of the technology. It used to be that the telephone and the amateur radio were the only two-way communication devices, with radio and television broadcasting blindly to a massive audience. The only way that the content providers could close the feedback loops was with tedious surveys (Nielsen ratings, among others).

Then the Internet came along and changed everything. Uploading became as important as downloading. Web 2.0 pushed the importance of social media and the idea that everyone’s voice is equal. Anyone with an Internet connection became a broadcaster as much as a member of the audience.

This doesn’t mean that each individual, myself and yourself included, carry as much clout as a major network like CNN or MTV. The major networks still stronghold broadcasting thanks in part to the prevailing saturation of cable television in the average household. The problem with this method isn’t just limited to the aforementioned lack of immediate viewer feedback, however. It’s also an incredibly inefficient broadcasting method. Here’s basically how the cable industry works:

Producers sign contracts with networks who help fund the development of programming. Networks make agreements with cable providers who then broadcast not one or two channels, but all channels at once to each and every home they service. Subscribers view only a few channels at once despite generally having hundreds of choices. This is equivalent to your cable company constantly spraying a massive fire hose on full blast constantly, and you use that humongous stream of water to wet a toothpick. Everyone gets their own fire hose, too. Since cable lines can only handle so much data, most television stations viewed through traditional cable get compressed to hell. They’re sub-standard quality, in effect.

The networks get paid a lot of money from cable providers for the right to run their shows, and then the cable company adds their own fee on top of this to arrive at the ghastly figure they bill you for each month. The entire system is designed to generate as much money as possible for people who benefit from being gatekeepers, one-way broadcasters, and content producers. And many of them deserve the money they make, too.

Unfortunately, you end up paying to have a fire hose of content you don't want permanently spewing into your house. The idea of being able to pick and choose the stations you want is as old as cable television itself, but cable providers have always had a good excuse: They can’t do this because they wouldn’t be able to afford all the channels, and everyone has different tastes. That means everyone has to pay for everyone else’s channels so that everyone can have the few that they actually want.

But what if we were to trim down this entire business model and make it a heck of a lot more efficient? This is the idea behind Internet-based television. Not only can you turn off the fire hose, you can choose a specific episode of a specific show that you like. This is the difference between Niagara Falls and your kitchen sink.

The next major hurdle with this concept is that it’s inconvenient to go to the website of the network or show you want to watch and hunt down the content. This is where services like Netflix and Hulu try to bridge the gap; they give you an easy interface that works not just through your computer, but within your entertainment center’s media devices such as your TiVo. The pairing doesn’t always work out, but it’s still better than the alternative of going to www.HGTV.com and looking up the show you like.

The networks still don’t like this setup because they tend to lose a lot of money this way. Hulu has a hard time securing the right to show many shows because of the deals they run with other networks and their attitude toward advertising. Also, the streaming from the networks’ own websites can carry some flaws in the way advertising works.

So it looks like we’re not going to see Internet television at the level that cable television exists until someone can figure out how to simplify and coordinate the economics of the entire thing. Media giants like Viacom are too protective of their brands, but like the idea of people paying for 10 shows just to get the one that they want. It helps secure funding for the other shows. Commercials as well don’t seem to work as effectively online as they do through cable.

Here’s my proposal for how Internet television should work in five years:

It’s like Apple’s App Store. Consumers pay for a service like Hulu or Netflix that works through any one of many home media boxes such as the TiVo, Roku, or Boxee. The consumer pays for each channel, or bundle of channels, like an app in an app store. This way you pay for exactly the channels you want, and the content providers get you to subscribe to bundles of content at once, ensuring payment for all of their shows.

Each network is responsible for providing the stream through which their media is accessed. Viewers choose episodes of specific shows, or watch the live stream from that network. This takes the burden off of the service provider who no longer has to worry about providing the stream, just the bandwidth. Content comes in more reliably, with less artifacts, and in higher resolution than before, because the information is sent when requested by the viewer. Because the Internet is a two-way communication channel, the viewer interacts with the stream in many ways, including instant feedback. Monitoring the number of streams being provided at once ensures highly accurate viewership statistics.

Instead of paying a monthly fee for both Hulu and TiVo, like I unfortunately do, the consumer pays a single bill. That bill includes a small subscription fee for the service, a larger fee for the Internet connection, and monthly subscriptions to each channel’s “app.” Therefore, the viewer can customize their bill to include exactly the channels they want; mid-month, if they choose, they could even include a new channel by paying the monthly fee for it (in my estimate, less than $3) to watch a show that they otherwise may not have.

The Wii U's controller and browser

Advertising could be more creative than just commercial breaks during shows. Viewers could choose to fill out surveys during a program or watch advertisements later for discounts off of their bills. Short quizzes after this content could ensure that the viewer is watching the adverts, with the alternative being that the viewer could simply accept paying more for the luxury of having commercial-free programming. An augmented reality remote control could be used to remotely “tap” on on-screen content to launch a mini-browser with advertisements; clicking through those ads while the show plays could allow the viewer to skip any upcoming commercial breaks. The Wii U’s controller is quite an inspirational device in this regard.

I know that what I’m describing is basically Google TV, but with Google aggressively targeting a purchase of Hulu, we may be seeing something like this in the near future. We’re not going to see cable go away anytime soon, but with viewership rates steadily declining due to poor quality and outrageous bills, these kind of Internet-related alternatives are becoming more attractive. I’d say we’ve got about five more years before we see a completely useful consumer service that allows Internet TV to surpass cable.

Who Are the Kandi Kids?

2011-06-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

Due to the massive recent press coverage of the Electric Daisy Carnival and its various satellite gatherings, many people have been re-exposed to rave culture. Though it’s been held every year since 1997, the event has broken through to the mainstream news—not because of its impressive attendance records, incredible light shows and decorations, or superstar lineups of electronic artists—but because of an overdose in Dallas.

The event itself used to take place in Los Angeles, but split off into Colorado in 2008, Puerto Rico in 2009, and Dallas in 2010. One 15-year-old at the L.A. 2010 event died of a drug overdose, causing the city to ban future Electric Daisy Carnival events, so for the 2011 season, the main event took place in Las Vegas, with other events in Colorado, Puerto Rico, Dallas, and Orlando in the week leading up to the Vegas event.

During that week, at the Dallas event, the news reported that numerous attendees sought drug-related medical attention, with two people dying as a result of drug use (though the second didn’t die from an overdose; after panicking for several hours, he purportedly shouted, “This should end it,” and ran in front of a speeding semi.) The attention brought to the festival in the week leading up the massive main event in Las Vegas has led to an unprecedented amount of coverage to a party and culture that have been around for a long, long time.

The general public has specifically become interested in the subculture of the attendees of these events, the so-called Kandi Kids. With their outrageous brightly-colored outfits which often include crazy makeup, novelty t-shirts, bikini tops (or no bikini tops, traded in for pasties), costume items, and dozens of necklaces or bracelets (the eponymous candy), these types of people make excellent subjects for news stories and photo journals, and their stories of excess and marathons of partying and drug binging are extreme gossip fodder. Though to some, this may seem exciting and new, it’s really just an evolution of a long-existing subculture; nonetheless, many want to know:

Who exactly are these “Kandi Kids”?

This is a subculture that comes and goes in waves of popularity largely due to current musical trends. When pop music is highly dance-oriented—generally meaning that it uses synthesizers as the primary instrument—other forms of electronic music experience a rapid surge in listeners as well. The fans then seek out events, parties which are often called “raves,” mostly by the media and not as commonly by the actual members of the subculture. For this reason, kandi kids are sometimes referred to as “kara,” a shortened version of “kandy ravers.”

"Kandi Kids" at Electric Daisy Carnival 2010

There was another similar burst of activity within the rave scene a little over ten years ago when dance music and these types of parties were very popular. In that era, there was a near-identical subculture of partygoers who dressed in much the same fashion. Both men and women would wear angel or butterfly wings, neon wigs, and gigantic pant legs to these parties. The women all pulled their thongs way up out of the back of their pants, much to their parents’ chagrin.

"Candy Ravers" in 2001

And then ten years before that, the New York City party scene was brought to mainstream attention by the Club Kids, most famously dramatized in the 2003 film Party Monster. This was one of the first club scenes to feature thoroughly outrageous outfits, and many of the trends that currently exist within rave culture were founded during this period. If you want to read an exceptional first-person account of this era, I recommend Disco Bloodbath by James St. James. Or just watch that movie with a bit of skepticism.

"Club Kids" in 1990

However, this still wasn’t the first era to feature excessive drug use in a dance environment. We can look back yet another ten years to the disco era to find the basic origins of that aspect of the music. You can follow this logical progression, from disco, to club kids, to candy ravers, to kara by watching the trend over time. And not surprisingly, house music is the genre that seems to have survived every era. From Studio 54 through the Electric Daisy Carnival, it’s all the same scene.

I was actually a part of this scene in the early 2000s, though it was my interest in electronic music that brought me there. I was part of an electronic music group call The Alpha Particle Projext, and it was my mission to seek out contacts, get booked to play parties, and just generally have a good time. As it turned out, I had much more success as a DJ, but also playing noise sets as half of Aemma-O (later called NARC.)

I went to a crapload of these parties. I never once attended one while intoxicated; no drugs, no alcohol, nothing. It wasn’t my thing, but I didn’t condemn those that did it. I know that ecstacy enhances appreciation of music, but I would never be able to tell you what was in one of those pills, and my appreciation of music was already about as high as it could get. As I networked and played shows, the scene grew to incredible notoriety, and the parties became much more about making money for the promoters rather than fostering a scene. I can still vividly remember the last party I went to.

It was held in a warehouse in one of Atlanta’s many industrial parts of town. I had three DJ friends who were playing records that night, so I was interested in going, though my involvement in the scene had waned significantly. I arrived to an hour-long entry line which featured a full airport-style pat-down and security checkpoint—not to keep people from bringing in weapons, but to stop them from bringing in water and drugs to compete with the promoter’s employees inside.

When I got inside, I noticed that it was at least 100 degrees in there, and the ceiling fans hanging above were turned off. Everyone was sweating and suffering. Seven-ounce bottles of water were selling for $3. Drug dealers and undercover officers paced the place asking everyone if they were looking for “disco biscuits.” As I stood watching a random collection of images being projected on a wall, I felt a splash of liquid on the back of my legs. “Great, someone spilled their drink on me,” I thought as I turned around. In actuality, a tiny teenage girl, completely decked-out in raver gear including angel wings, glitter all over her face, and something like a hundred bracelets, was puking on the floor. Her friends held her up by her armpits as her eyes rolled around in her head.

A friend of mine who I had arrived with was supposed to meet up with a raver girl that he had met a few times before, and when he found her, he found an entourage of gullible young men following her around, all hoping to get her attention. She had invited all of them there to hang out with her. “Did you bring those Yellow Jackets?” she would ask one of them, who would anxiously whip them out of his pocket. Later that night she was throwing up over a wall from too many of the legal gas station stimulants.

I left. the scene wasn’t so much about music as it was about an idealistic “good time to be had” that involved promoters unfairly preying on their patrons while the crowd looked for drugs, took way too many, and got sick. There were others in that scene who didn’t take it to excess; my friend Jeff, who was playing records that night, was a moderate drug user but was completely sober that night. I spoke to him briefly about the direction the scene was headed in.

“Man, this is the way it’s always been,” he said, “and it’s the way it’ll always be. We just have to let the idiots make their mistakes so that they ditch out. Then it’ll be pure again.”

As I made my way back to the parking lot, I passed an ambulance, and paramedics were loading up a guy on a stretcher who was freaking out, screaming some of the most bizarre stuff I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m pretty sure he’d taken way, way too much LSD.

The scene collapsed on itself shortly after that event. The venue, less than a month old, was closed due to a high rate of overdoses reported that night. Other venues around the city saw a steadily declining attendance, partially due to the re-emerging metal scene in the city. It was just another moment in the cycle.

The candy ravers, meanwhile, stayed underground, remaining very close to their normal routine. The term evolved slowly from “club kid” in the 80s to “kandi kid” in 2011, but let’s face it, nothing’s really changed.

What's a Used CRT TV Worth in 2011?

2011-06-28T06:39:00.000-07:00

The reign of the cathode ray tube is over. It was the original mechanical masterpiece of the television era and was the technology behind each and every TV and computer monitor we used up until a ten years ago when flat-panel technology began to become affordable. Now that you can get a 42” LCD TV for $400, no one bothers to buy CRT anymore.

Diagram by Søren Peo Pedersen

So what exactly is CRT? Well, you know those televisions and computer monitors with the ridiculously long backs that drop down at an angle? They hold a massive electron gun. I know that sounds really cool, but it can kill you if you mess with it. The gun fires a beam of electrons at the back of a phosphorous screen, selectively exciting tiny points on that screen at an unfathomably quick rate to form images. The result of this is a watchable, but low resolution image.

Not only do they have sub-par picture quality compared to the flat panels we all love, they’re ridiculously bulky, often being longer than they are wide. And if you need to move one, good luck, because those things—even the smaller computer monitors—are stupidly heavy.

You might own one. Lots of people still have these things. A couple years ago when mine broke, I went to go buy a new TV, but all the flat-panels were still close to $1000, so I settled for yet another CRT at the entirely reasonable price of $180. Then, for my birthday this year, my brother finally bought me a nice LCD TV, so it was time to sell the giant boob tube.

TV for sale; dog not included

So, what’s a CRT worth in 2011? This was something I was excited to find out. I knew it wouldn’t be a lot. I figured I’d get $20 for it, but I’d settle for $10. I anxiously posted an ad on Craigslist and waited for someone to bite.

Now I’ve sold tons of things on Craigslist, some of it entirely useless: Pyrex cookware, a kitchen knife, old mysterious power amps, a broken subwoofer (fully disclosed damage), eight-year-old computer motherboards, and a drum machine from 1986 among other things, and most of those items were in the $30-50 range, so I expected this TV to be picked up by somebody. Nope. The ad expired without a single inquiry, not even from a scammer who would want to know if “my frend can pick up it.”

So I reposted the ad. Maybe it was a rough time of year, and no one was looking for a TV. It’s in perfect working condition! It’s all black! It’s only $20! Nothing. Meanwhile, it sat collecting dust in my second bedroom.

Finally, I decided it was time for the thing to go. I had been collecting a pile of useless stuff to donate to Goodwill for quite a while, including some broken computer parts that I didn’t want to take to the dump and pay to dispose of. I know this makes me sound like a bad person, but I figure I’ll just take all my crap to Goodwill, and if it works, they’ll sell it, and if it doesn’t they’ll take it to the dump for me. Hooray! Plus, I’ve donated at least $1000 worth of stuff that I was too lazy to sell, so I’ve earned my money, I think.

I put the TV in my car, and as I was carrying it, I remembered thinking, “This is the last time I’ll ever have to move one of these things.” It was a particularly liberating thought, considering that it weighed close to 100 pounds. I also took a bag of clothes, a bag of shoes, a CRT monitor I’d been trying to sell on Craigslist for six months, a broken flat-panel monitor, and two old computer cases which I had crammed full of broken disc drives, video cards, and power supplies, and drove all of it to the donation center. When I pulled in, a young guy came out and looked in the car.

“Are those CPUs?” He asked. Technically, yes, there were CPUs in the computer cases, so I confirmed it. “Okay, I’ma have you leave those in the car and take them over to that dumpster.” Fine with me. That’s easier than driving them to the county dump. He took the TV inside. I waved goodbye.

For some reason, as he was taking the computer monitor inside, I pulled one of the computer cases out of the car. “No, no, leave that in the car! I need you to take it to the dumpster over there,” he said, pointing behind the dry cleaners across the parking lot. I put it back. He took the clothes inside, and I pulled the flat panel monitor out from under the passenger seat.

“Oh man, another monitor?” he said. “Hell yeah, I’ma get that too. I’m gettin' off in about five minutes,” he said to me. “Take that to the dumpster, too.” It had become very clear to me that he was scamming Goodwill. By acting as the gateway to donations, he could pick which items he’d take home with him to sell for personal profit. It didn’t matter to me at all.

“Okay, so you see that dumpster over there? Just put all that stuff on the ground behind it. Thanks a lot, man.” I obliged him by driving all three items over there and leaving them where they belonged: In a pile of garbage. I would have felt bad about aiding him in defrauding a non-profit organization, but everything he asked me to hold onto was completely broken, while everything that went inside was working perfectly fine. He actually helped both myself and Goodwill by taking the burden of electronics disposal off of both of us. I wonder how pissed off he was when he found out that all that stuff was trash. Well, that’s karma!

However, his actions say a lot about the worth of a CRT television. His keen eye for materials worth fencing determined that the totally intact television was worthless, while all that broken crap translated into money. It turns out that a CRT television isn’t even worth someone taking for free.

I’ll check out Goodwill in a few days and see if it’s out on display. Only then will we see what someone else thinks the thing is worth.

Why Do Theaters Project Film Reels Instead of Digitally?

2011-06-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

I don’t really like going to the movie theater. They’re not usually playing anything I want to pay $11 for, and $4 for twenty-five cents worth of soda is an unbelievable rip-off. Many people say to me, “But you can’t get the same experience at home!” They’re right. I don’t get an amazing sound system, uncomfortable seating, 40 sick people coughing in the Winter, and idiots clapping at the credits in my living room.

But what I hate most about going to see movies in a public theater is film. It’s a horrible archaic form of media that we still hold on to for some reason. In an era where we could easily project a massive high-quality digital image onto a screen, our projectionists still have to lug around enormous film reels, feed them into the projector, and switch them over at exactly the right moment. By comparison, they could be placing one big disc into a drive and hitting “play.”

Laser discs have been around since 1978! Blu-ray discs can hold up to 128 GB of data and they’re only 4.5 inches in diameter! Why haven’t we made the switch yet?

Well, in actuality, lots of theaters have begun to convert their theaters to digital projectors, but the units often cost $100,000 each. The theater I go to on the rare occasion that my wife convinces me to has 18 screens—considered average in metro Atlanta. That would mean a $1.8 million investment to update each screen just for an average-sized theater! Multiply that by the number of AMC theaters in Atlanta, and you’ve got a fairly massive chunk of money the company would need to burn.

They don’t stand to recover their money, either. The savings from distribution of optical discs is attributed to the movie studio who would previously have to dump a significant portion of a film’s budget—on average $5 million or more—to have a bunch of reels printed up. Pouring and stamping out discs saves them a lot of money, but it doesn’t save the theaters any money at all, so there’s hardly any incentive to do so. They wouldn’t need to hire less projectionists, because usually there’s only one or two people running all the rooms anyway.

Theaters are slowly updating, though, under pressure from studios who are getting sick of printing film reels and sending them out, but they’re finding it hard to convince people to head into the theaters to see movies in “all-digital” format. After all, even the highest resolution digital image has a hard time competing with the “infinite resolution” of film.

Here’s some reasons why we should all embrace digital projection at our local movie theaters, even if it doesn’t result in a reduced ticket price.

The picture quality is ultimately better. Sure, film enthusiasts will claim that nothing beats the intense colors and clarity of film, but you’ve got to go on opening night to see it. Why? Because every time that film is run through the projector, it runs the risk of getting damaged. By the time a reel gets shipped off to the dollar theater, it’s a horrific mess of scratches, dust, and artifacts. The fact is, the longer you wait to see a movie projected from film, the worse the picture quality will be. However, a digital disc never loses its picture quality, no matter how many times it’s viewed.

The entire movie can run off of one disc. In order to accommodate thirty frames per second for a minimum of 5,400 seconds, a film reel needs to hold a lot of still images, but each image needs to be big enough that it looks flawless on a forty foot wide screen. If every frame was put on a single reel, the thing would need to be impractically large, so most movies use four or five reels which a projectionist has to switch between at the exact right moment. Ever seen the black dot that shows up in the upper right corner of a movie sometimes? The first dot is a warning; the second dot is the cue to flip the switch. Watch, and you’ll notice that the picture and sound quality are briefly interrupted when the switch is made. I find it distracting, but then I’m a nerd that pays attention to that stuff. The projectionist is doing a delicate dance of running around the room flipping the reels at the correct moment as if maintaining a bunch of plates spinning on poles. There’s such a huge amount of human error that’s possible here that it makes a lot more sense to feed a giant, half-terabyte disc into a digital projector and hit “play.”

A wider variety of movies can come to each theater. Theaters don’t usually take a chance on an artsy low-budget film because they’ve got to make money off of it somehow. If no one knows what it is because the studio didn’t have a huge ad campaign to raise public awareness, it’s less likely that someone will go see it. Therefore, if a theater gets their hands on a copy of something like Rachel Getting Married, they’ve got to put it in the smallest theater and try to run it exactly enough times to maximize profitability. They don’t usually share films even within their own chain because it’s too difficult, dangerous, and expensive to send the stack of reels around the city. But if they each had their own optical disc of the low-budget flick—at a production cost of only a few dollars each—the studio could make back their cost with just a few ticket sales. (This would also benefit low-budget films who would no longer need to set aside a significant chunk of money to produce the reels.)

If this all sounds good to you, then there’s good news! In 2007, Variety magazine predicted that half of theater screens would be using digital projection by 2013, and adoption statistics seem to be supporting these numbers. And with the number of movies being shot on digital cameras these days, these display methods make more sense than ever. I’ll be looking forward to the day when I can go see a movie three weeks into its release when it’s just me, my wife, and a few other people quietly enjoying a scratch-and-dust-free film. Too bad ticket prices will be $15 by then.

Where Exactly Was Ryan Dunn's Accident?

2011-06-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

It always sucks when someone succumbs to a horrific circumstance when it clearly could have been avoided, even if that person hadn’t made millions of people laugh in his or her lifetime. And regardless of my personal feelings about drunken driving, dangerous behavior, or anything else that may have been involved in Ryan Dunn’s fatal car wreck earlier this week, the idea of someone experiencing something as violent as what he endured is something I’d rather not think about.

If you don’t know, Ryan Dunn was part of the Jackass cast, a TV show notorious for dangerous, painful, ridiculous, and often outright stupid stunts. It was something the world was bound to see sooner or later, and it evolved out of the CKY home video footage Dunn and his friends shot in the 90s. Though they were basically extending the America’s Funniest Home Videos format into psychotic territory, the troupe was ahead of their time, producing the kind of content we’d all search for on Youtube years later.

Then, on June 20, 2011, at about 2:30 AM, Dunn and a passenger were riding in his 2007 Porsche 911 away from a bar where he had been partying, raising his blood-alcohol level to 0.19—significantly impairing his ability to drive a car, much less at the estimated 130 MPH the vehicle was traveling as it jumped a guard rail and slammed into a tree. Though it might seem appropriate to some that his ultimate fate would be in the manner of the lifestyle in which he lived, no one wanted this for him. However, many people want to know:

Where did Ryan Dunn crash?

Not to be morbid, but there don’t seem to be any highly accurate suggestions for the location where his car crashed. I don’t necessarily have an interest in his death, or visiting the site, but I’d like to take a few moments to do some research into the precise location of his accident using news reports, on-scene photographs, and video.

We know for certain that the accident happened near West Chester, PA. CBS Philadelphia reports that the wreck occurred on Route 322 near Pottstown Pike—the road which leads to Barnaby’s, the bar he had been drinking at. Here’s an aerial view of this area:

This view from a helicopter shows a police car, tire marks on the street, and a double-yellow gore in the middle of the road, which means that we can narrow the possible area down to everything near the overpass of Pottstown Pike:

The gore shown in the image only appears on Route 322 for a 1500 foot stretch near this overpass. Then there’s this image of a police car next to an overpass and a torn-out guard rail covered by a police line:

Comparing that image and the street signs in the area, we can clearly see in Google Street View that this is exactly where it happened:

So looking from above, we can see the guard rail his car struck:

You can take put these coordinates into Google Maps to go straight to the accident scene:

39° 58′ 24.38″ N, 75° 36′ 51.27″ W

Or simply click here.

[UPDATE 6.24]: There has been some discussion about whether the accident site is on the east or west side of the overpass. Though both sides have a guard rail, clearance height sign, and merge warning sign, we can see that he definitely crashed on the northeast side of the bridge. Take a look at this view looking east which indicates the merge warning sign in the distance:

A closer view of this sign shows that it says "LANE ENDS, MERGE RIGHT" instead of the "RIGHT LANE ENDS" shown in the image of the torn-out guard rail shown above:

Then there's this view of another police car with more skid marks showing the exit from 322 to S. Pottstown Pike:

This should clear up any confusion about where the accident occurred.

[UPDATE 12/23/11]: Google Earth updated their imagery of this section of highway since the accident occurred. You can now see that warning poles have been installed in exactly the location that Dunn skidded through (seen in the image above).

Cameras are Everywhere, So Don't Stop Me from Using Them

2011-06-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

I’m standing in the pit at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Roswell, Georgia, watching Arcade Fire, less than 50 feet from the stage. I’ve got my tiny video camera, an Aiptek HD, pointed directly at Win Butler as he croons “No Cars Go” with the help of 7,000 fans. I keep the camera low and the LCD pointed down so it doesn’t get in the way of anyone standing behind me. Suddenly I feel a tap on my left shoulder.

“You need to come with me,” a security guard yells over the roar of the sound system. I look at my wife.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, “They want my camera.”

As I slip out of the crowd, he leads me up to the will call booth. “You can’t use a video camera here,” he informs me, “But you can pick it up after the show.” I ask him why I can’t use my crappy home video camera as I discreetly slip the SD card out of the bottom of the device.

“It’s against venue policy. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.” He takes me to a woman who is in charge of snapping on wristbands for alcohol-age concertgoers, and asks her to escort me to the will call booth.

“Quickly!” I yell, “This is my favorite song, and I’m missing it.” She jogs alongside me as we head to the beginning of this massive complex of concrete.

“He needs to check his camera here,” she informs the people at the booth.

“Sorry you guys, I didn’t think there’d be a problem considering that there’s hundreds of people down there using their camera phones,” I say as I fill out a form with my contact information on it. They then release me back into the venue. They're all nice about it, and I don’t put up a fight. I just head back down into the crowd, stand next to my wife, take the GoPro camera out of my pocket which has been recording the entire time, and shoot the rest of the show.

This actually happened to me last August. The whole time (and you can see them clearly on the video) there were at least three or four people within arm’s reach that were taking pictures and video with their phones. I can hardly see what the venue’s got against this, except that they want to have complete control over the patrons of their establishment. They probably think that money might be lost due to the video showing online. When I got home, I checked the FAQ on their website to see what it says about cameras:

Cameras are allowed subject to event. Please check the event-specific voice recording by calling (404) 733-5010. If cameras are allowed by the artist, you may bring in a non-professional (point-and-shoot) style camera with no removable lenses.

When I called the recording, I was basically told the same thing: Cameras are ok unless they’re professional-level devices. Okay, I can see their point there. The band and venue don’t want people to be making money from the sale of professional-grade photos or video of their likeness. They own their image, and tend to have the ability to restrict others from capturing it while they’re performing. At least, that’s the way it was in the past.

In case you haven’t noticed, everyone’s carrying a camera everywhere they go. There’s no way to stop it. It’s extremely useful, and actually acts as a safety device, requiring those in public to accept responsibility for their actions. Having cameras everywhere—in the hands of average citizens—is actually a really good thing for the benefit of us all. At the same time, it presents an impossible task for those who wish to restrict their use. The Verizon Wireless Amphitheater has accepted this, saying that use of your camera phone is acceptable, but professional-level cameras are asking a bit much.

And when it comes to video, there’s really no difference. They don’t want a shoulder-mounted camera going in with a high-quality microphone to make superb bootlegs, but they understand that it’s pretty much impossible to stop you from used your phone camera to record a low-quality video of the performance which will end up being for the benefit of yourself and your friends, and maybe a few people who come across the video on Youtube.

I’ve lamented the mass use of phone cameras in concert venues before, as I proposed that the use of Color in one of these situations would result in the user ending up with hundreds of terrible photos, and there’s more than enough grainy, blurry videos with distorted and over-driven sound hanging out on the web. But this content isn’t stopping me from purchasing concert tickets; if anything, it’s advertising the show for me.

In fact, three days before Arcade Fire played in Atlanta, they live-broadcasted their New York City performance on Youtube, directed by Terry Gilliam. I watched the entire thing and was excited about the show. It most definitely didn’t make me less likely to see them play in my home town.

I don’t exactly know why my video camera was confiscated, considering the venue’s policy, but I’m not that upset about it. It doesn’t really benefit me or anyone to have that video, but their confiscation really just turned me off from heading back to the venue for another $125 dump of money. Business owners, take note: Harassing your patrons is bad for profits.

But just when I thought we had all accepted that the world is different these days, and ever-changing, and privacy, copyright, and distribution need to be approached from a different angle due to existing and ubiquitous technology, Apple decided to throw a roadblock in front of logical progress. The company has patented technology that tells iPhones to disable its cameras when the owner is in a “no-camera” zone, which generally applies to venues specifically. The idea is that the venue would somehow be broadcasting a signal that would tell your phone to shut down the camera’s functions.

However, this isn’t going to change anything, it’s just going to slow progress. Not everyone uses iPhones, and those that do and are highly inclined will find a way around it. Plus, there are hundreds of pocket-sized point-and-shoot cameras that people will use instead. This sounds more like a way for Apple to alienate its own users by actually providing for circumstances in which their phones become less useful.

Not only is this futile, it’s a bit disturbing. If venues have the authority and technology to shut off your camera, what’s stopping anyone else from doing it? What if riot police broadcast a similar signal so they could enjoy beating you? What if I intend to use my phone to capture a crime in progress, like a person being severely beaten in the crowd of the concert? Apple doesn’t have any personal motivation that I can see to restrict the use of their phones, so this is clearly a business decision that works with the record companies that they partner with for iTunes.

Venue owners need to give up the fight and accept that they can’t control the actions of thousands of people who are all armed with cameras. It’s never going to stop, and it’s just going to incense them. By the way, here's nearly the entire concert I attended, pieced together with videos from the crowd (none of which are mine):

Ready to Start
Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
No Cars Go
Haiti
Half Light II (No Celebration)
Empty Room
The Suburbs
Ocean of Noise
Keep the Car Running
We Used to Wait
Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
Rebellion (Lies)
Month of May
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)

Intervention
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Wake Up

Kill the Like Button

2011-06-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been lamenting the choice of the “Like” verbiage within social networking for quite some time now, but the problem’s not going away. It’s becoming more adopted by various websites across the web, and continuing to gain momentum within our culture.

Most of us primarily associate it with Facebook, but the truth is that they don’t own it. Other websites, such as Youtube, carry their own “Like” button to be used for a similar purpose. The button is all over the place, especially being used on websites that want you to share their content via Facebook, or in commercials that say “Like us on Facebook!”

Let’s break down this word for a minute. The traditional use of this word is pretty complicated, and carries many possible meanings as an adjective, adverb, conjunction, idiom, interjection, noun, and verb. Specifically, it’s that interjection that has aggravated people so much over the years. Though the word goes way back, the origin of this use of the word is in the 1980s. Here’s the definition from Dictionary.com:

Informal. (used especially in speech, often non-volitionally or habitually, to preface a sentence, to fill a pause, to express uncertainty, or to intensify or neutralize a following adjective): Like, why didn't you write to me? The music was, like, really great, you know?

Associated with the valley girls of the 80s, it pushed its way into widespread use by the youth of the 90s and held firm with the young and middle-aged alike into the 2000s. Sometimes the use of the word is so strong that a person’s speech is pretty much impossible to follow. There have even been some guerilla campaigns to try to stop or slow the overuse of the word as an interjection:

So why would social networking websites begin to use this already-overused word on their pages? Well, in Facebook’s case, the button used to be the Awesome button, which would be used as a generic positive comment on someone’s status updates, basically affirming that the declared content was of good quality. Clicking the button would basically say, “I think this is awesome!”

They then changed it to the “Like” button, which I presume was seen as more professional or accurate. “I like this,” you would say instead while clicking the button. This use of the word as a verb slowly morphed into a more bizarre use of the word as a verb. Now, people will say—with complete confidence—such bizarre things as “Like us on Facebook!”

However, this button doesn’t necessarily mean that you like something. People use it to approve content; to give it credibility. It’s a way for people to authorize and recommend content to others, but also to give feedback to the author that the content was highly rated. What the button actually means is “I approve this content.” This gives people mixed feelings when they go to “Like” something that may not be the most positive comment on Facebook. Here’s an example of a status update:

My cat died today. He lived a great long life of 17 years, and will be dearly missed. Chubby, you were the best cat ever.

Would you “Like” that? It’s a tough decision, right? You may not want anyone to think that you like that their cat died, but you may want to lend support for them and tell them that you like their eulogy. In this case, the problem can be side-stepped by actually posting a comment that supports the person posting it. However, this message could be “approved” without worry that the person would take it the wrong way.

The problem with this verbiage goes in a different direction when somebody posts something negative:

I fell in a mud puddle on the side of the road today and chipped my tooth on the curb! What a crappy day!

A total ass would intentionally “like” this, but it happens unintentionally as well. The person “liking” it may have thought that the comment was intended to be a shared bit of comedic unfortunate circumstance for the entertainment of the fellow friends, when in reality it was a tragic and disturbing experience. The person that “liked” it now looks like an ass.

As a result, people have started lobbying for a “dislike” button, but Facebook continues to insist that they don’t wish to add negative social tools to their network and encourage people to dislike things. What they need is a neutral “approval” button, but “like” is equivalent to Internet currency now, so that won’t be changing any time soon.

In the case of Youtube, “Like” exists alongside “Dislike,” but they’re used to indicate the rating of a video. In this case, the use of these two buttons seems like it would be pretty straight-forward, right? You either like or dislike a video, and you click the appropriate button. But wait, it’s not quite that simple.

Youtube used to have a five-star ratings system for videos to allow the viewing community to differentiate between good and bad content, but more importantly, to isolate extremely good and extremely bad content. To simplify this situation, Youtube went all-or-nothing on their ratings and removed the grey area. Now you either like it or dislike it, but many people don’t understand which component of the video they’re rating.

For example, you might be watching a video of something tragic, like a horrific live performance by Amy Winehouse in Belgrade. Because it’s widely talked about in the news, you want to witness it for yourself, so you search for a video of this unspeakably bad performance. You find it; it’s up close to the stage, shows the massive train wreck in reasonable quality, and the length of the video is good. It’s an excellent capture of a horrible moment.

“Wow, this is bad!” you say, while laughing uncontrollably and highly entertained. Dislike! Now the owner of this content wonders why they’ve shared good content with a 1:5 ratio of like:dislike.

There are some people who have legitimately disliked this video. “I don’t want to watch this stupid idiot be drunk and moronic on stage,” they say. Still others, who are pleased with the results of their search, who found the video they were looking for and were entertained, have “Disliked” the video despite approving of its quality. This video, which probably deserves to be highly rated, is rated low even though people like it, because of the word “Like.” “Well, I don’t really like that she’s hammered beyond belief, and her singing doesn’t sound good,” they rationalize, while clicking the “dislike” button.

Google’s tried to reinvent the concept by introducing their “+1” button, but it doesn’t seem to be picking up steam just yet. Their hearts are in the right place, though; the idea is that you are recommending the content to your friends. However, this still doesn’t cover all concepts at once. You might recommend that someone watch an Amy Winehouse train wreck, but would you recommend a feline eulogy? Probably not.

What it comes down to is that we need a way to rate or approve content without expressing support for the content. Do we need a third button? The grey-area button that says, “I don’t like the subject, but I appreciate the content as a whole”? Do we need a “Like—under certain circumstances” button?

The First American Mass Planking is Just Around the Corner

2011-06-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

Image from michaelcampa.com

I’m going to go ahead and get this one out of the way before the media really takes it too far.

See, there’s this thing called planking that people do. It’s kind of like performance art, but it’s really an opportunity to have your friend take pictures of you doing it in an interesting location, or to have people stare at you in a public place because you like confusing people.

It originated as the Lying Down Game, developed in the late 90s. In order to play the Lying Down Game, a player must:

Lay face down
Have their hands straight out at the sides of their body
Legs straight out with the toes pointed
Have someone photograph them and post it on the Internet.

The idea is to mimic, as closely as possible, the shape and mannerisms of a wooden plank. Sound exciting? It’s not! And that’s likely part of the appeal.

The world became fully aware of the fad after rugby player David Williams planked after scoring on March 27, 2011.

Since then, there have been an unfathomable number of planking pictures taken, each trying to be in a more creative location than the last. You see, since the actual act itself is so stupid and pointless, the excitement comes from the environment: The object being planked upon, and the optional reactions of passersby.

As with all super cool fads, eventually someone had to die while doing it. On May 13th, the first planking-related death was confirmed after 20-year-old Acton Beale tried to plank on the seventh floor of an apartment building. Other plankers have dodged death by laying down on train tracks in front of oncoming trains and taunting police by laying on their cars—an apparently illegal act.

The fad is popular in countries around the world, originating in Australia, catching on in New Zealand, and being common in the UK and Iceland. In fact, both Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand have directly addressed the fad, with Julia Gillard of the former warning plankers to focus on “keeping yourself safe first,” while the latter’s John Key posed in a photo of his son doing it.

These kind of things generally get picked up in the United States and strangled for all they’re worth until they die a cold, over-exposed death, so it’s no surprise that it’s picking up steam here. Yesterday, CNN ran a news story entitled “Facedowns: New craze you’ve never heard of.” Of course, no one’s ever heard of it because no one calls it “facedowns.” The video segment’s tagline, “A Seattle-spawned lack of movement is inspiring a rather strange movement of its own all over the world,” isn’t exactly accurate, but then neither are the positions that the facedowners are doing in the segment:

Legs not straight? Arms out in front? Poor form!

I’m not sure if this is CNN’s fault or if Americans think they invented this hobby, but they didn’t, and “facedowns” is actually a much stupider term than “planking” anyway. But, given the American spirit of doing everything bigger and greater than everyone else, I have a prediction to make.

I am suggesting that we’re probably only days away from the first American mass planking. I haven’t seen anything about it online yet, but given that school is out for the summer and it’s a rising trend, it’s only a matter of time before someone organizes a huge, widely publicized flash mob planking. (There’s already a Facebook Group dedicated to this but it doesn’t seem to be catching on quite yet, as it only has 21 members.) Actually, this happened just a few days ago in Brighton, UK, so I just barely missed my mark. But the video's only got 300 views. That's roughly one per person in the video!

Here’s what will happen: Several hundred people will all meet in a public space in an urban area somewhere in a major U.S. city. Likely candidates include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, and Atlanta. It might even be a massive beach planking, occurring somewhere in Florida. Everyone will lay around, arranging themselves on top of statues, benches, fountains, and just the bare sidewalk or lawn. After a brief period of this, and once an accurate head count is taken, everyone will part ways. Someone will try to contact a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records to attend the mass planking. Hopefully no one will die.

It’s coming, I’d say, in as little as a week to as far out as three months. And then once it’s over, planking won’t be cool anymore. By this time next year, we won’t even talk about it.

Photo App Users Don't Make Good Photojournalists

2011-06-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Sports fans are funny, and every country seems to have a sport that fans lose their heads over. In the United States, it’s college football; in many places in Europe, it’s soccer football; but in Canada, fans go completely bonkers for hockey.

It makes sense. They’ve got tons of ice and cold weather, so even though Vancouver’s only about a hundred miles from Seattle, they’re going to get excited about hockey—especially when their team is in the season’s finals. Actually, some of these hockey fans are crazy enough about their team that when they lose badly in the final game of the series, they set fire to their own city. I’m not sure what the intention was. Punish their team for doing a bad job? Throwing a temper tantrum? A good ol’ fashioned drunken orgy of destruction?

Whatever the reason, it was the major news event yesterday. And when major news stories involve riots, as we’ve seen in Iran, Spain, and the UK recently, sometimes the best—or only—footage comes directly from cell phones. It’s something they’re extremely useful for. The smart phones of the world each come equipped with a camera and the ability to transmit pictures to the internet.

By contrast, major media outlets have to drive in with a van, set up a huge remote antenna, and transmit those images live via a massive pack attached to a video camera. Yes, the quality is greater, but in a hectic situation, we don’t really care about quality. What we want is content.

As Andrew Napolitano famously said, “The camera is the new gun.” Because they’re everywhere, and they hold people accountable for their actions, they tend to be more effective than shooting people with bullets. It’s a non-violent act of counter-protesting, capturing those who stood atop overturned cars in downtown Vancouver and set them on fire. I saw the pictures on multiple news websites that were taken by citizens armed with such cameras, not professional photojournalists. However, we’ve run into a little bit of a dilemma here.

Because smart phones have provided people with relatively powerful cameras with strong processing power right there in their pocket, we’ve moved into a new era of photography: the photo app world. People are sick of the novelty of just shooting pictures with their phone, so as a culture we’ve embraced running dozens of filters on top of those photos to stylize them, giving them a retro look, altering the color balance on the fly, and adding stylish borders among other effects. The photo app market is at the top of its game right now, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

So when the Vancouver riots happened, it was only a matter of time before Hipstamatic or Instagram would be used while taking photos of riots. Yep, mixed in with dozens of other shocking photos of car fires and smashed-out windows were a handful of retro-style shots of Vancouver on fire. This shot by Jenn Perutka may have been intended to be a stylish photo of the skyline and sunset juxtaposed with the ominous smoke of something going horribly wrong, but it was picked up by news organizations—who hunt down these photos due to their timeliness and royalty-free status—and published it alongside other, more clear photos of rioting.

I’ve got nothing against Jenn’s use of Instagram for this photo. It’s neat looking, and it doesn’t purport to be a photojournalistic capture of the event for media use. The blame is on the news outlets for running it. Here’s why:

I want you to think back to the 90s, and the home video camera you had. Remember that EFFECTS button on the side of it? With the push of a button, you could cycle through a range of effects like black and white, sepiatone, crystallize, mosaic, stained glass, inverse, etc. Hipstamatic and Instagram basically provide this service for cell phones. Now imagine watching a news story where someone’s pressed the EFFECTS button and we’re watching footage of the riot in mosaic/slow frame rate like a New Kids on the Block music video.

Here’s an example of what I expect your local news to look like in 5 years:

Photojournalists have long looked for what Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as “the decisive moment.” In these cases, it doesn’t generally matter if the photo is high quality if it captures a moment that can’t be recreated. In other words, sometimes a terrible photo with unbelievable content is superior to a well-framed, well-exposed photo of something less spectacular. An example of this is Robert Capa’s famous photo “Omaha Beach.”

The photo quality is terrible, but what it captures is incredible. We are at water level, watching a potentially doomed soldier pushing his way up onto a French beach to liberate Europeans from Nazi control. We know he’s headed into horrifically deadly gunfire. We can see the debris in the water behind him, signs that the war is raging. We can look past the fact that the photo is blurry because we know Capa didn’t have the proper light to get a moment frozen in time. He couldn’t ask everybody to hold still for a moment, and in this way, the blurriness actually adds to the chaos and feeling of frantic movement.

However, there’s a difference when an image is given intentional stylization and a news outlet runs it anyway. We don’t look at the news to see what the 2011 Vancouver riots might look like if they’d happened in the 1970s or been snapped by a Polaroid instant camera. We’re trying to see what happened, and, somewhat more importantly, who did it.

Well, there’s one great thing coming out of social media, and it has to do with what Napolitano said. Rather than shooting rioters with guns, creating a larger mass hysteria and possibly leading to people being trampled to death or being caught in the crossfire, we’ll let people make their mistakes, shoot them with the dozens of cameras nearby, and hold them accountable for their actions later. Let’s just hope that the incriminating evidence of someone torching your car hasn’t Hipstagrammed their face into obscurity.

Obituary: The CD Player in My Car

2011-06-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

The CD player in my car passed away last night. It was nine years old.

Born into a 2003 Saturn Ion in an automotive plant in Tennessee, the CD player seemed optimistic in a world full of MP3s. It was a proprietary in-dash unit, fused to a tape deck and a radio, and filled an enormous space underneath an awkwardly placed centered main console of the vehicle. It was ready to go.

The car it lived in was light blue and was purchased by an elderly couple for their granddaughter in early 2003. It was her graduation gift, though she was technically supposed to pay them back. Unfortunately, the pair passed away in 2006, but they willed the title of the car to her.

I first heard the CD player in 2005 as she pulled up to my house on one of our first dates. The CD player was happily cranking out a tune called “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” by the death metal band Meshuggah. I could hear it clearly even with all the windows closed, and instantly fell in love. She would become my future wife.

In early 2009, as we prepared for our wedding, my Ford Taurus began to fall apart in a number of ways. Specifically, the automatic transmission was about to give out entirely, so we parked it in our apartment complex and left it there for a few months. About nine of them. We rushed out and purchased a brand new vehicle—but because it was my car that was dying and not hers, she got the new car. It was a 2010 Kia Soul.

I took the Ion, and so began my two-year affair with the CD player. My MP3 player had given up hope, having been sent through the washing machine too many times, and its screen became too dim to see. I had given up on music and was listening to nothing but episodes of the podcast Uhh Yeah Dude in chronological order, but when the MP3 player stopped, I began burning CDs. I had been using the tape deck in my car with a tape adapter to listen to MP3s in the Taurus, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. I had a CD player in the car again.

I even went back to listening to actual music again, digging out piles and piles of CDRs from boxes in my closet. I pulled some of the original discs out of my 300-strong CD rack that sits in my second bedroom like a cheesy 90s version of a vinyl collection, gathering dust. The nostalgic fun didn’t last very long, as I went straight back to listening to UYD on a regular basis.

I then began a daily 60 minute commute with the CD player. With no tapes, no MP3 player, and no urge whatsoever to turn on the radio, it was my best friend, the companion that rode with me on the lengthy journey to and from work. We went through a lot together: Discussions of social media and trends, Craigslist ads, and an ever-present reminder to wear my seatbelt. We must have burned through close to 200 hours of UYD together on those pleasant journeys, and the CD player never skipped.

Then something unprecedented happened. I decided to treat the CD player to something entirely different. I would listen to the entire “Weird Al” Yankovic discography from beginning to end. No more of that talking, it would be time for some music!

The CD player died while playing “I Was Only Kidding” from the 1992 album Off the Deep End. Halfway through the song, it decided that it had enough and spit the CD out. I wasn’t used to it being selective, so I put it back in. It rejected it and never played a CD ever again.

I guess I learned my lesson. I shouldn’t have been burning so many CDs to begin with. I should have appreciated it more when I had it and not taken it for granted. In the end, it saw two loving owners who used it to its fullest. It can’t and won’t be replaced, because it’s fused to the climate controls. We’ll miss you, little guy.

After a week of mourning, I’ll get another MP3 player. I realized that to finish listening to every UYD episode that currently exists, I’d need to spend about $60 on CDRs. Coincidentally, that’s the exact same price that my old MP3 player is going for new.

The Incredible True Story of FreeCreditReport.com

2011-06-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

We’ve all seen those FreeCreditReport.com commercials right? The ones that feature a singing band? You might just think that this is a clever marketing scheme, but it’s more than that. There’s an entire story behind it, and you’re about to hear it.

The website in question is really just a front for a company called Experian, a US-based credit reporting business. In 1980, the UK-based company CCN Systems, another credit reporting group, was owned by Great Universal Stores, a massive UK retailer founded in 1900. For years, CCN did their best to monitor credit for its customers, working with a system that differed fundamentally from the credit system in the United States. However, in 1996, Great Universal Stores decided to reach across the pond and dip into a more global presence, acquiring Experian and merging it with CCN. Because Experian is a more scary business sounding name, the fused credit monster retained this moniker.

In 2001, Great Universal Stores shortened its name to the new-millenium-friendly acronym GUS. At this point, approximately 10% of its 50,000+ employees worked for Experian. As the credit reporting market grew, so did the company’s advertising presence. By 2005, the company had hired the best advertising agency in the business, and soon had a catchy jingle that stuck out in the minds of everyone that watched Judge Judy at 4:30 PM on weekdays. It went like this:

FREEEEEEE CRE-DIT RE-POOORT DOOOT COOOOOOOM!

Many an innocent television consumer was left replaying the ultra-catchy tune in their heads day after day. Ultimately, the URL being sung on a loop in heads everywhere led a curious few to actually visit the website. Some even signed up for and received their free credit report as promised by the Experian marketing campaign.

That same year, Experian was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing practices. The charges included misleading claims about offers the company claimed were free, but ended up being something in the ballpark of $40 per month services. Experian settled by returning approximately $950,000 of free credit monitoring for the individuals who had signed up for the supposedly “free service.” However, by this point the company was generating so much money that they were running on a $72 million annual advertising budget, so the million dollars in free services was not nearly enough to take the credit goliath down. It forged on.

Not even a second related investigation by the state of Florida’s Attorney General in 2006 was enough to shame Experian into backing down. MSNBC tried to intervene around the same time, but its findings that declared the company an outright scam had little to no impact on the general public. Experian’s massive advertising campaign not only thrived, it grew—monstrously.

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a nearly anonymous actor named Eric Violette was toiling away in the annals of the theater, portraying many a French historical figure in his native Montreal. Then one day, on a chance audition from the Martin Agency calling for actor/musicians, Violette landed the role of a down-on-his-luck guy who was the victim of credit card fraud. The commercial called for him to sing a catchy jingle which included the words “Free Credit Report Dot Com.” However, his French-Canadian accent proved unmarketable in the United States, so the commercial—and all subsequent commercials—were overdubbed by an unnamed American singer. The commercial was a major success, and Violette was called back to create more credit-related masterpieces.

Eight commercials later, Violette and the two bandmates from his commercials were internationally known; they had spanned nine different genres, from rock to hip hop, and brought joy to the lives of millions who signed up for a scam and had their accounts steadily drained for months on end. The campaign reached unprecedented levels of notoriety as people anxiously awaited to see what Eric and his band would bring to them next.

Dozens of parodies appeared online, most of which were homemade and posted on Youtube. However, a few high-budget parodies were created, including an entire MADtv skit based on the commercials. The FTC, Experian’s biggest critic, even created their own PSAs that parodied the commercials—to remind everyone that they can already get a “no-strings-attached” free credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com.

In 2009, the Credit CARD Act specifically mentioned FreeCreditReport.com in a section addressing any companies that offer a “free credit report” in advertisements. All such commercials must now include this statement:

This is not the free credit report provided for by Federal law.

In addition to this, the act requires those same advertisers, despite advertising a free credit report, to remind viewers that they can get a free credit report at AnnualCreditReport.com. This last little bit—requiring Experian to advertise for its effective competitor within their own commercials—pushed the company over the edge.

In early 2010 they dropped FreeCreditReport.com as a major advertising focus and fired the band. It was time to move in a completely different direction. Experian began a highly publicized search for a new jingle-delivering band to be the face of the advertisements, which would now be for a completely different website—FreeCreditScore.com.

The auditions served to raise awareness that Experian was shifting from long-winded credit reports to the more brevity-conscious credit scores that could be related in a much more efficient manner. MTV, among other media outlets, covered the auditions extensively as they traveled from New York to Los Angeles, landing in Chicago, following the competition through to the finals. The four final bands were announced after the Major League Baseball’s All Star Game that year, and the American public voted for the winners. In the end, the victorious band was none other than Detroit indies The Victorious Secrets.

It didn’t take long for the much-anticipated first commercial to air; The Victorious Secrets delivered their jingle with vigor, truly capturing the hearts of their audience. Written by the Martin Agency’s Dave Muhlenfeld, the band merely plays the songs while they work on their full-length album, rolling in the $10,000 cash prize awarded to them for winning the competition.

Later that year, in a completely industry-bullshit-free independent decision, the band realized that their clever pun of a moniker could no longer reflect the serious tone of their musicianship. They mutually decided that it would be much better to change their name, and promptly requested to be known as the American Secrets. Said guitarist Byron Rossi:

“Some very close personal friends of the band strongly suggested we change our name. We decided to take their advice and are now moving forward into the great wide open of the glorious unknown as The American Secrets...and we intend to rock people like the proverbial ‘hurricane’ while doing it.”

Halfway through 2011, the band has completed two commercials for FreeCreditScore.com, have a show lined up for the end of July, and have released a self-titled album via iTunes. Eric Violette continues to act, and has his own band, God Against God. Meanwhile, Experian has been hanging out in the background, growing like an awesome melanoma on the skin of the Earth, announcing a 13% increase in profits this past quarter. This story’s not over.

This story is factual to the best of my knowledge and is therefore proclaimed as “true.” Any embellishments are added purely for satirical purposes. This story used the following references with the purpose of being as accurate as possible:

Credit Report and Credit History | Free Credit Report
Eric Violette
Experian plc
Home of the FreeCreditScore.com Band!
Marketer of “Free Credit Reports” Settles FTC Charges
MSNBC: Florida AG investigates FreeCreditReport.com
MSNBC: Many free credit reports still aren't free
The American Secrets
The New York Times: A Free Credit Score Followed by a Monthly Bill
The Victorious Secrets Named New FreeCreditScore.com Band
The Victorious Secrets Change Their Name

Why Doors in Public Places are Sometimes Locked

2011-06-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

Photo by takomabibelot

Yesterday I talked about same-stepping, that awkward thing you do when trying to pass someone out in public, and described how it was one of those things that makes me apprehensive to step out into the real world and get lost in a crowd. But today I want to address something else that makes me fear public places. It affects all of us, and it’s a completely unfair thing that we all encounter on a regular basis.

I’m talking about double-doors—but specifically those sets in which one’s permanently locked.

Yep, it’s uncool. It’s dangerous. It’s probably just a way for store employees to bring a little bit of amusement into their otherwise melancholy days. I’ve been telling people for years that my theory for the half-unlocked doorway was so that a hidden camera could capture people looking stupid as they attempt to walk through the door.

If you’re one of the rare few who never experience this, here’s basically what happens: You go walk in or out of a business. There are two doors, generally glass, that are side-by-side. You’re not going to open both of them, of course, so you pick one. It’s probably the one on the right, if you live in the United States, since we’re conditioned to travel on the right sides of paths. One of the two doors is locked. If you always pick the right door, you’re going to hit the locked door either on the way in or out; this means your chances of encountering the locked door are extremely high.

You walk up to the door and push, but it doesn’t open. “Oh, oops,” you announce, as you pull the door handle. Nothing. You realize two things: That you need to use the other door, and that you look stupid.

Hey, if there’s a really good reason for it, I understand. If there’s a sign on the door that says “PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR,” then it’s your own fault. But when you’re walking in or out of a clearly open business and there’s no warning, you can’t be blamed for falling for this trick. You are an innocent victim.

I’m particularly bad about these things because I have poor posture, leaning over the front of my feet as I walk at a brisk pace everywhere I go in a quest to be ultimately efficient. I walk up to the door, shove it with a good bit of force, and it doesn’t open. My body’s momentum keeps me moving forward still, and my face stops approximately one centimeter from the glass, nearly breaking my nose and knocking teeth out of my mouth.

I can’t recall a time where I was injured or anyone laughed at me, but it’s coming. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s going away any time soon, so we’ve got to continue to deal with it. However, I assume that my theory about a sadistic storeowner with a lust for hidden camera footage of people ramming their faces into glass doors doesn’t carry much merit, since those people would be likely to sue. The lawsuit factor leads me to believe that there are other reasons behind this phenomenon. I decided to do some investigation.

Every time I encountered one of these doors, I would ask an employee why it was like that, making sure to clarify that I was merely curious and not complaining (a total lie.) Only one day passed before I exited the right side of a double-door at H&M, only to find that it was locked. I went back to the sales counter.

“Oh, that door should be unlocked,” the employee said, “I guess someone just forgot to do that.” I politely asked her if she’d do it under the guise that I wouldn’t want anyone to get injured, but in reality to see if she’d do it. She did. The door unlocked and was free to move.

A new reason: Someone “forgot,” or was lazy.

Two days later, I actually went into a Taco Bell. I have no idea why I did this, but as I attempted to enter, the door wouldn’t budge. I almost took this as a sign to go home, but dedicated to my cause, I walked up to the counter and asked someone about it. I was deferred to a manager.

“Actually, the door’s broken, we need to get that fixed.” A little more prying revealed that they had been locking the door at night with a pair of scissors, and that one day the door couldn’t be unlocked anymore. I appreciated his honesty.

Another new reason: Door is broken, and no one wants to get it fixed.

Then, about a week later, I went to take some of my wife’s clothes to a Psycho Sisters consignment store to sell them. The left-side door wouldn’t open, which was unfortunate because I was carrying a huge bag of clothes that barely fit through the open side. While the owner was going through my wife’s stuff (yes, my wife knew I was selling her clothes) I made some small talk, inquiring about the door.

“We keep one side locked when it’s really hot or cold to keep the air in,” she told me. I’m not entirely sure of this reasoning, but it sounds like something someone would do.

Yet another reason: Air conditioning is expensive in Atlanta.

So there you have it: Four potential reasons for a locked door. Though I can guarantee that someone out there is enjoying watching people try to open a locked door, I didn’t have to try very hard to find three legitimate alternatives: Oops, broken, and frugality.

But they should still put a sign on the door!

Check out this short n' sweet article which addresses similar concerns.

What Do You Call that Thing where Two People Step Back and Forth Trying to Pass Each Other?

2011-06-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

I’m not a big fan of crowds, but I’m not scared of them. Nope, no agoraphobia here. I function perfectly fine; I don’t panic, and I don’t get angry. Regardless, I try to avoid the mall and large social functions, and it’s not because of long lines or rude people. In actuality, I’m just worried that I’m going to end up doing that stepping-side-to-side thing that you do when you encounter someone walking straight towards you.

You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s a universal phenomenon, experienced by all peoples around the globe. Why, I’d even bet that those South American tribes that aggressively fire arrows at helicopters have this issue. It might even happen to deer walking around in the woods. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what happens:

You’re walking somewhere, and someone is walking directly toward you. You both need to get to a destination immediately behind the other person. Often, one of you will move out of the way the other. In half the situations where both people are considerate, you’ll both move to the side in opposite directions and continue on your paths. But in the other half of situations involving mutually considerate people, you’ll both step in the same direction.

“Oops!” both brains think at the exact same time, “We’re still coming right at each other. Better step to the opposite side.” Now you’re both moving to the other side, and still right in front of each other. Usually this step side-to-side motion only lasts for two or three rounds before one of you relents and stands still to let the other one move past you. I’ve had this stupid phenomenon go on as many as six rounds recently.

God, I hate that. It makes me feel stupid, because now I’ve had to share a mutually embarrassing situation with a complete stranger that I didn’t want anything to do with in the first place. Especially if I’m in a rush, I’ll come dangerously close to invading the other person’s personal space, as if we went from anonymous individuals on a path to bizarre dance partners suddenly.

I’ve come to realize that there’s no good word that exists to describes this concept. This is odd to me, because I can guarantee that even Socrates contemplated it at some point. Fortunately, there’s Urban Dictionary, which covers pretty much any concept you can think of with user-suggested terminology and definitions. Let’s explore the candidates:

Awkward Dance (10 thumbs up)
Blisterfeld (1 up, 7 down, -6 total)
Dezing (8 thumbs up)
Eldon (11 up, 16 down, -5 total)
Florange (8 up, 8 down, 0 total)
Indicisajig (9 thumbs up)
Palabnob (2 thumbs up)
Same-stepping (6 thumbs up)
Sidewalk Boogie (3 thumbs up)
Stranger Dancing (3 thumbs up)
Supermarket Shuffle (7 thumbs up)
Walkenshloffen (92 up, 1 down, 91 total)

With twelve entries, we clearly need to settle on a word. And as further proof that this concept is in dire need of naming, I’ll bet that you’ve never heard any of these terms before. What we need is a name that is descriptive of the occurrence, but emphasizes the side-to-side motion or the similarity to dancing. Right away I’ll have to eliminate the most nonsensical terms. This leaves us with:

Awkward Dance
Indicisajig
Same-stepping
Sidewalk Boogie
Stranger Dancing
Supermarket Shuffle
Walkenshloffen

I’m keeping the last one because it’s partially descriptive and wholly embraced by the Urban Dictionary community (also known as 13-year-olds.) Some of these, though, could still be misconstrued to mean other things. “Sidewalk Boogie,” for example, could indicate some sort of spontaneous public dancing; “Stranger Dancing” and “Supermarket Shuffle” both conjure similar imagery. “Awkward Dance” is something that I do anywhere, any time I attempt to dance. We’ll have to cut all of these. This means our finalists are:

Indicisajig
Same-stepping
Walkenshloffen

Indicisajig is a decent term; it describes the confusion of the situation while mocking its dance-like quality. It’s a weird mashup, but we’ve seen weirder words make it into the Oxford Dictionary recently. However, I don’t quite think it’ll catch on. Maybe as a slang term.

Same-stepping is my favorite choice, but clearly not the UD community’s. It’s an evolution of the term you would use if you were the only one to get out of the way (you would “side-step” the person coming at you) and it therefore makes a lot of sense. Calling it “stepping” is also a good way to tie in the dance aspect as well.

Walkenshloffen is pretty much a nonsense word, though it sounds German. However, even if “shloffen” was a German word, “walken” means “to tumble,” so the term doesn’t make any sense in that regard. I think if you were saying “Man, I just walkenshloffed with someone in the hallway,” no one would know what you were saying. But there’s some merit to this term getting more than eight times the votes of the second place term on UD!

What do you think? I feel like we could end up saying “Man, I hate side-stepping with people at the mall.” It’d be a lot better than saying “I just did that thing where you try to pass someone while walking toward them but they go the same direction as you and then you both go the same direction again, and then—you know what I’m talking about? Never mind.”

Feel free to choose from any of the above, or submit your own.

Snapbucket Quietly Enters the Photo App Pool

2011-06-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

I don’t really want to share my photos with anyone. I take a crapload of photos but I rarely take one that I think is worth making anyone else look at. This is awkward for me, working for a tech company, having a degree in social journalism, and living during the War of the Photo-Sharing Apps. 

When I was getting my degree, I had to set up an account with a photo-sharing website to post my stupid photo essays that I produced for my digital media and photojournalism classes. This was 2008, and smart phones barely existed. There was no Hipstagram, no Twitterypic, no ColorPath. If we took pictures with our phones, they were at 1.5 MP, they might get posted to Facebook, but in general we’d just forget about them and move on.

Anyway, I held my hand over my eyes and pointed to a random photo site on the Internet. My finger landed on Photobucket, so up the photos went. In later classes, I posted these photos there as well. Then I promptly forgot about it.

Enter the era of mobile photography, where phrases like “Shot entirely on an iPhone” and “tilt shift” became signals of the smartphone elite. Retro photography made another comeback, but instead of having to spend a bunch of time and money buying and developing film, photo apps shot up all over the place that would filter your crisp 3.0+ MP photo to look stylized, classic, and/or old. Of course, lots of people liked it. I appreciate the anachronism to a certain degree, but the market has become over-saturated, unfortunately.

We’re living in a time in which a thousand photo apps are fighting for staying power, a battle which will weed out the weak or unusable, leaving behind a few strong competitors. To be eligible in this game, you need to have an app that’s been around for a long time, or, failing that, is unique in some way or has a really strong marketing campaign. This battle has been going on for over a year now. Suddenly, I get this semi-broken email from Photobucket:

Aw snap! It’s here! My one and only photo editing app. Snapbucket allows me to snap a picture, edit it, and share with friends. But here’s the kicker: You can do all of this—wait for it—from your mobile phone! Hey, it’s the easiest way to style a picture YOUR way and share it with Photobucket. But guess what? You can also post to Facebook and Twitter too.

All my problems have been solved. I’ve never seen anything like this before! You’re saying that I can take a picture with my mobile phone, style it right there on my phone, and then share it—directly from my phone? Why, this is a revolution!

It’s an easy three-step process, really. First, snap a picture of your dog in excellent lighting with accurate colors and crisp clarity. Now, choose a filter, such as this one that makes it look like a nuclear blast is right behind you. Now, share it! Everyone can see your excellent picture balanced improperly with way too much red hue. Photobucket for life!

So let’s see if this new app satisfies any of my proposed requirements for having a fighting chance in the photo app war.

Early in the game: Nope, it’s June 2011. There’s already a thousand photo apps out there, so this one’s officially a latecomer.
Unique: Well, it allows you to apply a preset filter and share it via social networks. This is more of a base requirement than a groundbreaking feature. Snapbucket’s going to need to do stand out in some way if it wants to stick around.
Strong marketing campaign: Well, this is the first time I’ve heard of it, so maybe there’s more coming. However, this email is a pretty significant failure. First of all, this spam relies heavily on images to sell the product, which is a problem for me and Gmail, since images aren’t displayed by default. As a result, this is what their email looked like when I first opened it:

I don’t even know what’s happening there! Normally I would skip this altogether as clearly spam, but I’m interested in the progress of the photo app war, so I chose to display the images, getting the email shown earlier. As you can see, the image is broken into chunks, exaggerated by the borders around each clickable section of the email since they forgot to remove link borders. Here’s a sample of the code from this email—specifically, the code to show the top image with the “Snapbucket” logo:

<img style="display: block;" src="http://pic.pbsrc.com/landing/snapbucket/email_images.v2/row1.jpg" alt="Snapbucket">

Fixing this issue would have just involved placing the line “border: 0;” after “block;” which they would have realized if they had tested the email before sending it. So far, the marketing campaign is off to a rocky start! Here’s what the same email looks like after I fixed all the image link borders:

My guess is that Photobucket’s not trying to make a big splash in the photo app market. This is more of an obligatory app they whipped together so they won’t fall behind in the social media market. They’re hoping you’ll use their app to post your photos to their website instead of sending it somewhere else. The filters are just a way to appear to fit in with the current photo app scene. And if you choose to share to Facebook or Twitter, it’ll append “Snapbucket” onto your message, which translates into free advertising for the company.

It’s a smart move for a company that doesn’t want to become obsolete, but it’s not going to be the one that sticks around. They’ll need to make Super Snapbucket if they really want to be taken seriously.

Why Teleportation Scares the Hell Out of Me

2011-06-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

Man, driving can be annoying. Plane flights? Have fun arriving an hour early and waiting three hours for the flight to even show up. Even if you need to go to the grocery store during an ice storm, you might not be able to walk up the hill at the front of your neighborhood.

It sure would be nice if we could teleport. It would solve a lot of our problems, both transportation- and energy-wise. We could just zap our packages over to another person’s house when we sell something online. You could live in Boston and work in New Delhi, and your commute would be as difficult as walking into the next room.

Ideally, this makes sense. We all want easy, quick, cheap transportation, and we’re sick of paying high gas prices anyway. It seems to be the way of the future. After all, they have it on Star Trek, right?

Not exactly. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, didn’t initially envision such a device. Instead, he expected the Enterprise to land and drop off passengers every time they visited a planet. But because this would have cost a lot of time and money for the television series, and because crossfading video techniques were so cheap, the series developed the Transporter, a device which moves objects from the ship to the surface of a planet (or other location.)

The theory behind the device is that an object or person is “dematerialized,” being converted into an energy pattern; the pattern is then beamed to another location and ”rematerialized.” This process, the destruction and reassembly of the body, is precisely what bothers me so much. It’s not that I worry that it’ll be uncomfortable or frightening, it’s that there’s no way to tell if it actually recreates the original person.

The brain is a crazy thing. It’s simply a collection of neurons arranged in a specific way. Everything about us—all our emotions, behaviors, knowledge, and memories—are simply patterns of neurons. Because of this, if for some reason there’s a weird arrangement of neurons that creates a false memory, you’ll swear that it actually happened. It will feel like a complete fact to you, even though it’s completely absurd, and solely because of the pattern of cells in your brain.

Deja vu might work similarly: In all moments of every day, your current experience is being stored in your short-term memory. One deja vu theory suggests that the brain temporarily and accidentally stores those current experiences in the long-term memory. As a result, the brain is confused into thinking that what is currently being experienced is analogous to an experience from long ago. You end up thinking “What a minute, I’ve done this before!” yet it’s a total illusion.

So let’s assume that a teleporter is highly accurate and can scan your body exactly, recording the precise positions of every atom in your body, and can rematerialize a completely identical body in the destination location. Every mole, every hair, every tiny spec of the organelles of body cells are perfectly intact, in place, and composed as they were before dematerialization. Thus, the brain is rematerialized identically—with the exact same pattern of neurons, and therefore, the exact same emotions, behaviors, knowledge, and memories.

The first body was destroyed in much the same manner that a body would be destroyed by being thrown into a wood chipper, but with a cleaner method. A physical change occurs, breaking the matter down into much smaller pieces. The body, brain, and consciousness no longer exist. Well, in theory, they kind of do: The matter, converted to energy, is being beamed through the air.

On the other end, the energy is converted back into matter and reassembled to be identical to the original. However, this new body has the same memories as the original, but is in fact a completely new organism. Therefore, if I stepped into a teleporter, smiling, and waved a temporary bye to everyone who would then watch my body be dematerialized, they’d be watching my violent death.

Not in the way that the teleporter malfunctioned in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where two officers writhed in agony, screaming until their bodies were destroyed and nothing ultimately rematerialized. Not even in the way that human DNA mixed with insect DNA in The Fly to create an individual who slowly morphed into a disgusting mutant. Nope, this would be a quick, exciting, and consequences-free death in which no one would ever know that it happened.

Here’s my main concern: I’ve stepped into a teleporter, endured my body being completely annihilated, and died. I no longer exist. My consciousness doesn’t go on. My journey in this vessel has come to an end.

Meanwhile, at the destination, a new individual is born and comes into existence, realizing consciousness. He is identical to me in every way. He has all of my long-term memories and probably my short-term memories as well. He knows everything I did, including anything I’ve never told anyone. He truly believes that he is me, and that he has always been me. Everyone around him would assume that it’s me, the teleportation was a success, and life goes on.

Because everyone who is teleported comes out thinking they’re the person who was just dematerialized, there is no way to know for certain whether it’s the same person as before. Consciousness is a weird thing. Did I die? Did my consciousness go on? The only way to know for sure is to experience it yourself. Unfortunately, every rematerialized human will swear that the teleportation was a consequences-free success.

The Voice Boldly Takes Social Connectivity to Places No Man's Gone Before

2011-06-08T07:40:00.000-07:00

NBC’s got a singing competition show, but it’s not American Idol, The Sing-Off, The Singing Bee, Don’t Forget the Lyrics, America’s Got Talent, The X Factor, Making the Band, Grease—You’re the One That I Want, or Majors & Minors. Nope, this one’s completely different.

It’s called The Voice, and it features celebrity judges, audition episodes in which some people are delusional about their singing ability, and eliminations based on audience voting. It’s totally unique!

NBC is trying really hard to distinguish this show from all the others. Yes, it’s a singing competition, but it’s more than that; it’s a spiritual experience. They’re performances in which each singer is coached by one of the celebrity judges. Oh, judges? Sorry, they’re coaches. Also, rather than being the “full package” like in other shows aiming to find new celebrity talent, the auditions were based solely on the singer’s voice. That’s right, the ju—coaches had their backs turned to the singers during the auditions so they wouldn’t be influenced by the person’s looks. As a result, some crazy-looking people made their way into the show.

Okay, so it does differ in that regard. Some of these contestants would never have been taken seriously on American Idol, so at least they’re in the competition. However, the voting public—the same people who just sent a group of pre-pubescent boys to the final on America’s Best Dance Crew—are still in charge when it comes to eliminating people, so we’ll see what happens.

Speaking of voting, NBC is also claiming that the show is “the most socially connected competition on television,” because voters now have four options instead of three: By phone call, by text message, by website, or by... downloading the song the singer performed from iTunes. That last one’s the big innovation, apparently, because the tally for all downloads of the song will be figured into whether or not a singer is eliminated.

But wait a minute! We’re not talking about paying for and downloading a recording of the contestant; we’re talking about the original recording. Or cover recording. I’m not sure of the details, but I know that if someone sings “Proud Mary,” they’ll get votes if someone downloads the Creedence Clearwater Revival recording. If this is the case, doesn’t it make sense for the singers to pick songs that are currently selling in droves? That doesn’t seem fair.

For example, one of the best performances of last night’s show was a cover of “Heartless” by Kanye West; but what if someone covered “E.T” by Katy Perry, featuring Kanye West? One’s probably selling a couple thousand a week, while the other’s hanging out in the millions. If there’s no way to distinguish between those voting by buying the song and those who are buying the song and completely oblivious to the impact it has on the show, then it’s definitely not fair.

My guess is that NBC understands this but has a deal with Apple or the record companies that own these songs; adding this as a “voting option” is really just a way to push sales and doesn’t really have an impact on the voting. It’s also clearly part of NBC’s marketing scheme to distinguish this show from all other singing competition shows on TV.

Mixed in-between the performances were updates from V-Correspondent Alison Haislip backstage who was reporting on the status of the show’s social tools. “Twitter is blowing up right now!” she frantically screamed, as if the awesomeness of the talent and the explosion of online commentary was nearly too much to handle. I pictured an arrow on a spinning dial that moved from “lol” to “2 Hot!” and then dangerously teetered on the edge of “OMFG!”

In these scenes, Haislip walked around with a microphone in one hand and an iPad in the other, reading live tweets featuring amateur critique of the performances just after they happened. The setting was a sort of backstage diner, with contestants who had already performed sitting around little tables with bar stools, iPads in hand, supposedly tweeting to all their fans or engaging in some other kind of social media interactions with viewers. More than one looked up at the camera to see if they were still on-screen and needed to continue pretending to use the devices.

It’s not necessarily NBC’s fault. They didn’t want to do “another singing competition” to begin with, so the social media integration is the compromise to make it happen. And while this stuff is clearly the future of media, and artists interacting directly with their fans is a proven PR method, it’s coming off a bit forced. Haislip shouts to Carson Daly like a concerned Scotty in the engine room of the doomed Starship Enterprise. She’s practically crying for help, drowning in a sea of tweets that are overwhelming in their awesomeness.

They’re on the right path, though. I don’t know about the iTunes tie-in, but social connectivity is definitely the future of competition. I just wish they weren’t forcing it so much.

Next up, another competition show called Singr. Or better yet, Sing. Contestants will tweet while performing, using an iPad as a microphone. Tagline: This show shot entirely on an iPhone 4.

[ UPDATE 6/15 ]: Last night's episode clarified that the iTunes downloads are of the performances from the show, not the original recording, which makes a lot more sense.

New Nintendo Wows Audience with Silly Name

2011-06-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

Gasp! Look at all those tech bloggers!

Well, Nintendo certainly grabbed everyone’s attention at the E3 conference today by announcing new games, new innovations for their 3DS, and finally, revealing their new (and highly anticipated) gaming console. Not surprisingly, almost all of this stuff is being delayed until Holiday 2011. This translates into a shopping frenzy with limited stock, of course, and means the largest number of people possible punching each other in the face because if they don’t get it, their kid will hate them forever and like the divorced spouse more.

This is specifically what happened with the Wii at launch, which is why I found it so weird that there wasn’t a similar frenzy for the 3DS. It kind of makes sense though, because as far as anyone knows, the 3DS is merely a 3D version of the DS, and everyone who wants a DS already owns one, so only psychotic gamer freaks and the especially skilled whining children got one for Christmas.

I was particularly excited to watch the conference streaming live because I wanted to see the new console. I had been reading for a while about the new controller, and it seemed like an interesting concept. Nintendo’s long been the innovator in the controller realm, from the original NES pad (the first use of a D-pad instead of a joystick) alongside the Zapper, through the 50 button behemoths in the 90s, and up to the minimalist, motion-sensitive Wiimote. (The Playstation controller wins for ultimate design in my book, but that’s a different story altogether.)

Specifically, I wanted to know what the new console would be named. I had already assumed it wouldn’t be Project Cafe, which was its development name; I was crossing my fingers hoping it wouldn’t be the Stream, which shares a name with a service my company offers and might drive us into obscurity. I even submitted my own name—the Squibble—which I still prefer, even though I’m fully aware of how stupid it is.

So what is it? What did Nintendo come up with this time?

The answer was so underwhelming that I didn’t even realize it as they were announcing it. There was a long setup story about how the Wii, doubling entendrically, was how we had fun, and we discovered ourselves, etc. Then they said that this new system would be all about you.

Sorry, I meant U.

The Wii U.

That 2006 console that sits under my television conjured up hilariously onomatopoetic sounds as I imagined little kids playing it. “Wiiiiiiiiiii!” they scream in my mind, as an on-screen Wario yells, “Take that, loser!”

Now they’ll be screaming something else: “Wiiiiiiiuuuuuuuu!”

The “U” is disturbing for me; it reminds me of the time I went to the World of Coca-Cola museum and watched a “4-D Movie” about the origins of Coke in which they promised to reveal the syrupy drink's secret ingredient. Nearing the end of the unbearably long 13 minute film, they still hadn’t told us. But then a man in a lab coat who had been narrating the entire film broke the fourth wall and looked directly at us. In 4-D.

“The secret ingredient is... you!” he said, barely believing it himself.

“What a cop out,” I said aloud to my fiancee and the other three people in the theater before standing up and leaving.

This new console’s name holds an equally undear place in my heart. Naming conventions as of late have been particularly underwhelming, and this one feels like it’s copying Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo’s two closest competitors.

After all, Nintendo’s been leading the market for quite some time. Every time it looks like one of the other two have one-upped the gaming giant, they come back with something extraordinary almost immediately. In this case, Nintendo’s Wiimote offered an interactive gaming experience on a level so profound that Sony rushed a PS3 wand to market four years late and Microsoft developed motion-capturing technology called Kinect, appearing to edge out Nintendo.

Then Nintendo completely blasted the others to pieces with their new touchscreen-enabled controller, which acts as a sort of iPad/D-pad mashup. It’s like playing the Wii using your DS as the controller. The conference presentation included a segment in which the controller was shown being used in innovative ways, such as:

Continuing to play your game on the controller as your asshole dad watches “the game.”

Drawing with a stylus like some sort of futuristic Etch-a-Sketch.

Playing Othello on a tabletop with it. I wonder if they’ll put these in Pizza Huts like the old Ms. Pac Man games.

Augmented reality, pointing at the screen, etc. Maybe the Wii U’s baseball game won’t suck.

Petting your dog during a video call. They need to shrink this down onto a wristwatch already.

Can Kinect do any of that? Is the PS3 even relevant in the gaming world anymore? The answer is probably yes to both, but clearly this little thing’s going to be a powerful device. It’ll also cost a jillion dollars.

So why the crappy name, Nintendo? Did you want to appear like the Xbox, upgrading to Xbox 360? Did you want to follow the footsteps of not one, but three generations of Playstations? Putting a single letter on the end makes it feel like a tiny upgrade, when in fact, it’s an enormous leap. The processor is way more powerful. The video card supports 1080p video finally. The mega-controller blows your mind. It even cooks you dinner and drives you home from the bar.

There are a few unanswered questions here that Nintendo will have to figure out. How is this thing going to be affordable? Will it actually interface with the DS as promised? Will it support Netflix and Hulu? If it streams a live view of my reaction to people above my character as I play Mario Kart online, what stops me from seeing hairy dongs hovering over Luigi’s head?

I have faith in Nintendo. They never disappoint, and they provide a constant flow of unbelievable content. I wish they’d called it the Squibble, but I guess I’ll just get used to saying “Wiiiiuuuuuuuuu!”

Even the Best Buffets Breed Bad Bacteria

2011-06-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

Buffets are bad for you. I know you may not want to admit it, but there’s something inherently wrong with a line of food that everyone eats and everyone interacts with. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were all neat freak germaphobe hand sanitizer junkies wearing surgical masks, but we’re not—in fact, most of us are actually pretty gross.

Nonetheless, there’s an interesting and unique culture that surrounds buffet buffs, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that I don’t understand. However, I’ve got a pretty good grasp on what’s going on here.

First of all, buffets exist for the purpose of convenience and frugality. It’s a win-win situation for everyone that doesn’t get sick, a symbiotic relationship between business and consumer. Create a relatively limited menu that everyone chooses from; now, rather than deal with the headache of taking orders, figuring out what everyone had, and billing, charge up front for the buffet and set them loose, allowing them to get whatever they want in any quantity.

There are two kinds of consumers that this largely appeals to: The thrifty, and those who like to eat a lot. Thrifty individuals flock to the ideas of a place where they can spend a set amount of food on each person in their family, and if they don’t like something, they can always try anything else at no extra charge. This works especially well in sushi buffets and other types of food where you may not understand what you’re ordering.

For people who like to eat a lot, the all-you-can-eat buffet is like heaven. Try everything. Get as much as you want of everything. Keep getting food until you can’t get any more food. Food food food food. That’s the theme. Some people see “All You Can Eat” as a challenge: Let’s see how much I can eat!

Then you’ve got people who fit into both categories, and this is where things start to get gross. Since there’s no time limit to most buffets, people will camp out all day. They’ve got a system worked out: Pay $9.99, eat as much as possible, then sit around reading for a little while; now go take a massive dump. Ready for round two? Repeat.

Indeed, whenever I’m in a buffet restaurant, there’s someone crapping in the bathroom at all times. Sometimes side-by-side dumping, even. Most disturbing is that it’s only the employees who are required by law to wash their hands after using the bathroom—and these people go back to interacting with your future food right afterward!

The problem with buffet is not that the food is low quality, although that’s sometimes the case. The problem is that there’s too many people handling your food.

Employees handling your food is rarely the problem. They usually do wash their hands as often as recommended, and much of the time they’re taking extra precautions: Gloves, hairnets, not working the line while sick, etc.

But let’s assume that there’s 100 people that go through the line before everything is replaced, and one of those people has E. coli on their hands. There are 24 items in the line, and the infected individual interacted with 8 of them. Now 1/3 of the line is potentially contaminated for the dozens of people that goes behind that person.

Was it one of the professional buffet enthusiasts, straight from a bathroom break and ready for another round of still-free food? Was it a little kid with undeveloped hygiene skills? Was it one of the many people who might have sneezed into their own hand, scratched their nuts, or even just touched their unwashed hair?

Next thing you know, you’ve got food poisoning, as happened to my wife and I this weekend after a stop at a salad buffet in Kennesaw, Georgia. There were only four things we both ate: Iceberg lettuce, mushrooms, shredded cheese, and french onion soup. If it was the lettuce, then a whole lot of people got food poisoning this weekend. Unsurprisingly, lettuce is the first thing in line, and one of those things that everyone interacts with.

We got off easy; even though my wife’s pregnant, we didn’t end up in the emergency room like the poor saps that hit up the Golden Corral across the street in 2006. The salmonella outbreak that year sickened at least 22 people and was traced back to a drain in the kitchen floor. In this case, it was the restaurant’s fault, but the buffet serving style only exacerbated the risk. The infection was so potent that someone actually died from eating there.

By the way, if your food kills someone, it’s time to rethink your business model. The Golden Corral incident was not necessarily representative of the problem with buffets in general, but of course it’s a concern. It’s not usually the employees’ fault; if it was, I’d get food poisoning all the time. It’s not necessarily that the food quality is low, either. The problem is that lots of people with poor hygiene touch my food before I do.

The business model’s gotta change. Keep the all-you-can-eat; keep the long line protected by sneeze guards. Just have the employees put my food on my plate for me, and we’ll be better off.

Leave Voice Acting to the Voice Actors

2011-06-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a lot of respect for voice actors. No matter how many different voices I try to make, you can still hear my voice hidden in there somewhere. But people that do voices for a living can get any of a number of amazing sounds out of their mouths, probably by contorting their faces into weird positions or grabbing their throats, and other methods that I just don’t do because I can’t be bothered to look that weird while making a funny voice.

Take Mel Blanc for example. Yes, I know, we’re starting with the legend, but just think about his voice for a moment: While it's true that Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird sound similar, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Barney Rubble, Speedy Gonzalez, and Elmer Fudd are worlds apart. We all know that he did every one of those voices, but just take a moment to imagine all those voices and how varied they are.

Probably today’s modern equivalent is Billy West, the vocal genius who voiced characters from Ren & Stimpy and Futurama among a plethora of other highly rated cartoons. As a testament to his ability to keep up with the greats, he’s regularly hired to do the voices Mel Blanc can’t do anymore, because, you know, he’s dead.

West and his colleagues live in the vocal world, where looks don’t matter. They’re rarely on-screen, and they’re okay with that. Because they only have to deal with sound, they get to spend their entire career refining their trade, developing new voices, new inflections, new ways to approach speech, sound effects, and singing.

Not surprisingly, West is also a vocal opponent to the use of Hollywood screen actors in voice roles for animated movies. He’s got a good point; the highest-paying roles are going to people who, while possessing excellent control of their voices, are better suited for acting on-screen. The voice actors are actually better than the screen actors, and can approach the characters from an original angle.

The game changed in 1992 when Disney cast Robin Williams in the role of the Genie in Aladdin. Williams, long heralded for his cartoon-like voice, fit the role quite well. He had just completed The Fisher King and Hook and didn’t need the money or exposure, but chose to be involved with the film anyway. At the time, this was considered a poor career move.

Before Aladdin, screen actors that took voice work were generally on the decline, losing their popularity and relevance. If you took a voice role, it was an indication that you didn’t have very many choices of film roles and had to take what you could get. But with Williams’ incredible performance and the subsequent profits that rolled in, movie studios began to beg big-name actors to follow suit.

The result of this trend was a line of animated movies starring great actors who had great voices and could deliver lines exceptionally well, but unfortunately, only in one voice: Their own. Tom Hanks in Toy Story; Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo; Patton Oswalt in Ratatouille; they were all great in those roles, but they also sounded like themselves. Meanwhile, if the movie gets turned into a TV series, as was the case with Aladdin, the roles are relegated to voice actors who probably should have played those roles to begin with. The fact that they can produce those voices equally well is proof that the popular actors were only cast for their star power.

“A star-studded cast” has long been a vomit-worthy Hollywood pitch, and now, in an era in which animated movies are focused on multiple demographics, star power is more important than ever (think Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy in Shrek.) Kids don’t care if Johnny Depp is the voice of Rango, but adults sure do. Need a female lead? Call Abigail Breslin, she’s popular right now.

The trend goes so far that it extends into non-animated movies as well, such as 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are in which Mark Ruffalo and James Gandolfini, two exceptional actors with no voice-over experience, were cast in major roles as the voices of the giant monsters at the focus of the story. A whole generation waited anxiously to hear what these characters in a children's book from their youth would sound like, and guess what? They sounded like Mark Ruffalo and James Gandolfini.

Star power? How about casting Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig in one movie? How to Train Your Dragon made efficient use of an entire cast of characters relevant to the entertainment world of that year, and the result was a steady stream of positive reviews. But I just can’t help but think of how Billy West, Tress MacNeille, Tom Kenny, and Dave Willis would have handled those roles.

Star power is one thing, but what about those opportunities in which voice-overs are performed by big-name actors who aren’t even credited? I can look the other way when John Corbett takes on the task of being the voice of Applebee’s, since his career’s not exactly full-on right now. But John Krasinski as the anonymous spokesperson for Blackberry?

The trend is out of control. We’ve got an entire scene of unbelievable talent being passed over in favor of household names. But who’s to say that Billy West in the role of Remy from Ratatouille wouldn’t have catapulted him into nationwide awareness? The film could have used some more talent, even if only in supporting roles. I mean, they put Brad Garrett in that movie!

The ultimate irony of this situation was when Bill Murray decided not to reprise his role as Peter Venkman in “The Real Ghostbusters” animated television show. The role was played by Lorenzo Music—who admittedly only had one voice, but it was a good one. By this point he was already famous as the voice of Garfield in the cartoon cat’s home movies and the animated series that followed. But when it came time to do the live action Garfield movie, Music had already passed away. Guess who was cast in the role? Why, none other than Bill Murray himself, of course.

Another disappointing chapter in this saga involves the creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks and his son. Ross Bagdasarian, the creative genius who created the characters after recording his voice at a slow speed during a recording session, built a legacy based on this technique; but as anyone that’s ever tried it can attest to, we all sound like chipmunks when we speed up our voices. Nonetheless, his son Ross Bagdasarian Jr. took over as the voice of the three rodents after his fathered died. However, when he was approached for the rights to make the Alvin and the Chipmunks live action movie, he was refused the voice acting job in favor of not one, but THREE voice actors, including Justin Long as Alvin. Good move, Fox Pictures!

It’s not that these actors are doing a bad job. Hiring talent that’s proven to produce stunning results can’t be a bad business move, but I’ll always be left wondering how it could have turned out with a real voice actor instead.

Harvestmen: Performing Public Service for Free

2011-06-02T05:33:00.000-07:00

I like spiders. No, not enough to own a tarantula, but enough that I’ll tolerate small ones living in my apartment. Most insects don’t get the same courtesy from me, and definitely not other arachnids like scorpions or ticks (neither of which I’ve ever seen in there, fortunately.) But if I see a big spider, rather than grab the nearest shoe and hammer it into oblivion, I’ll trap it with a disposable food container and release it outside. Sometimes, I’ll carry them out there by the strand of silk they’re releasing to get away from me.

I understand that my lack of arachnophobia means that I’ll probably be killed by a venomous spider at some point, but I like my eight-legged friends. They sit in the corners where the wall meets the ceiling—a veritable highway for ants—and trap smaller creatures as they travel through my apartment looking to infest things. My wife hates it. She wants me to get rid of them.

This leaves me in a kind of Joe’s Apartment situation, but instead of cockroaches, they’re little, translucent, immobile spiders hanging out, doing their own thing. I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me, I let them eat ants. You see, there seem to be ants living in the walls at my apartment. I’ve spent two years caulking up every crack and hole I can find so they’ll stop streaming into my abode by the thousands to eat cat food, garbage, soda, and soap. Yes, soap. They found a crack in the tile of my shower and tried to run away with my Irish Spring.

This symbiotic relationship I have with the little guys goes beyond my apartment. I appreciate everything they do for us in general. They’re like nature’s pest control, doing their part to reduce the ant population among other insects I’m probably not aware of. Without them, we’ll have more pests trying to run into our living space.

And contrary to popular belief, spiders are extremely harmless. Almost none of them bite, and the ones that do want to be far, far away from you. They don’t spread disease the way that cockroaches do, and their webs are actually an extremely rich source of protein. Just kidding about that last part.

Look how happy he is!

Actually, one of the most harmless and friendly arachnids is the harvestman, though it’s not a spider. You probably know it as the Daddy Long Legs if you live in North America. They’re the ones with the tiny little bodies and the long, skinny legs you see roaming around in the summertime, feeling the ground with their two extra-long front legs like a little blind arachnid tapping the street to make sure it’s safe to cross. (By the way, harvestmen differ from spiders mainly in that their abdomen and cephalothorax are fused, giving their bodies a circular look.)

If spiders are nature’s pest control, then harvestmen are nature’s garbagemen. They don’t produce silk, so they can’t spin webs; they’re not very fast so they can’t really jump on other insects; instead of eight eyes, they’ve only got two which don’t really serve much purpose anyway, hence the front legs doubling as white canes.

They don’t even produce venom. I know this might be shocking to you, since you’ve probably been told that they’re the most venomous creature on Earth, but that their teeth are too short to bite humans. It’s a good story, but just about as untrue as they get.

Instead, they just roam around until they feel something food-like, then eat it. This could be bacteria, mold, dead insects, slow-moving live insects, and even small dead vertebrates. They’re basically tapping around in the wild trying to find something to clean up.

Those legs really define their lives, but they also save them. When a predator is nearby, they don’t fight, because they don’t really have the means to. No, their survival method involves detaching a leg and leaving it twitching on the ground, distracting the predator while they quickly make their escape, exiting stage left. The predator is apparently so confused by this action that they just let the crazy bastard go.

I appreciate the public service that these creatures perform, which is why I don’t stomp them into the dirt like my friends did when I was young. My brother used to pick them up and carry them around by their legs to disturb people, a relocation method I use today when I find them in places they’re not supposed to be, such as my living room, or my wife’s hair.

I know that my tolerance for spiders and harvestmen can be disturbing for some, but I really feel that they deserve to live. They’re helping me, not harming me, and they’re an important part of the ecosystem. Even if they invade your home, even if they get big and ugly, even if they actually do have venom that can make your hand swell up to double its normal size resulting in amputation, they really mean you no harm. They just want to go about their lives and reproduce. Is that too much to ask?

If We Act Enraged, We'll Get What We Want

2011-06-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Noticed how prices of stuff continuously go up? Just when you get used to paying an outrageous price for something, the price increases. Hey, “that’s how they get ‘cha!”

The problem is that these companies know exactly how to ride that line between what we’re willing to put up with and what we’re not willing to put up with. Therefore, if we’re happy, they know they’ve got room to increase prices. If we’re calling them and threatening to cancel our service or stop buying their product, they’re likely to hold the price still. In rare cases, they could even drop prices—depending on how pissed we are, and wether we already dropped their service or product.

I feel that there are three levels that we move through as prices increase:

Tolerant
Concerned
Intolerant

Companies aim to catch us at the “concerned” level. If we move beyond concerned, we become intolerant, and the company begins to lose money. A “concerned” sentiment is characterized by motivation to communicate your complaints to the company and threaten—but not act—to discontinue the business relationship.

For example, you might call them up and say, “Your prices are too high, and if you raise them any higher, I’ll cancel my service.” You’re probably not lying, and they know this. It’s exactly the reason that a company is not likely to raise prices if they’re getting tons of complaints, unless they have no choice but to do so. The real trouble is when you become conditioned to the outrageous price and you move up into the “tolerant” category.

When consumers in general fit into the “tolerant” level, companies know that they can increase their prices without losing you as a customer. Let’s take the example of increasing gas prices.

When I started driving, gas was $.70/gallon, which made me happy, since I really didn’t have any money. WIthin a few years, gas jumped up to $1.50/gallon, at which price I was tolerant of the price. I remembering becoming concerned when gas breached $1.80/gallon, and many others felt the same way; when it did, gas prices hovered close to $2/gallon before we became tolerant of that price. Then it rose again.

Recently, as we’ve become used to gas prices above $3/gallon, gas hit a high of just over $4/gallon, at which point users became intolerant and began seriously looking for ways to become less dependent on gasoline. Not surprisingly, the price dropped down to about $3.65/gallon, where we seem to be tolerant of the price, though slightly concerned.

This model moves beyond prices and into other realms of our lives, such as advertising. Commercial breaks used to be shorter and more tolerable, but networks pushed the envelope to get us to the “concerned” position; commercial breaks could have as many as ten commercials in a row. As we’ve become intolerant of this, many of us are looking at Internet-streamed television programming.

Hulu used to feature only one commercial per break. When I tried the service last week, they were up to two commercials per break, where I remain tolerant, knowing that as soon as the company knows this, it’ll jump to three or more. As long as we’re not being vocal about our intolerance for the number of commercials they’re streaming, they’ll keep testing the waters by increasing the commercial count slowly; therefore, when I cancelled my Hulu Plus account during the trail phase, I informed them in the survey that two commercials per break was too many—a lie, but a sort of public service to existing Hulu customers.

You can apply this model to just about any business or political situation: Apartment rent prices, insurance costs, taxes; it might even work as a parenting strategy. As the consumers, the ones who are giving out money, we are the ones who control the system. If we appear to be on the verge of intolerance, we’ll get our way.

Even if we’re content with the state of our prices or programming, or anything else that can go from good to bad, we need to portray a concerned mood about the status of these things. If we’re honest, they’ll know how to manipulate us more to maximize their profit at our expense. We need to appear motivated enough to communicate our concerns so they they know that we’re not going to tolerate any more movement in the direction we don’t want. By this means, we can control them.