Apropos of nothing

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You'll shoot your eye out, kid!



Greenie Stickum Caps!!!

Via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Introducing the failPad

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In the previous comments thread, our prolific commenter "Anonymous" glibly predicted that the overhyped new Apple mobile media device would be "stupid." I could faintly imagine innovative possibilities for a highly portable multimedia touchscreen computer, but could not figure out how it could be successfully implemented. Forward-facing camera for videoconferencing and texting? Maybe cool, but cellular nets certainly don't have the bandwidth to support too much of that. Larger touch keyboard with tactile feedback (haptic) technology? Of interest to me, but I really can't see any advantage to a screen that you can't reach at least 3/5 of the way across with your thumbs, because laying the "pad" flat on a table would give the user a lousy viewing angle, and propping the screen up would give the user lousy typing ergonomics.

I felt that all the mockups were wrongheaded --- basically large iPhones with no apparent redeeming social value. Certainly the guy who sent engineers back to the lab a dozen times until they designed a MacBook trackpad with exactly the right texture would have obsessed over the ergonomics of the device, the hand feel, the effortless graspability, I thought.

Nope. Jobs's failPad is, in my opinion, astonishingly banal. The device appears to incorporate zero technical innovation and clumsy ergonomics. It offers no new essential, or even interesting, capabilities whatsoever (unless you think it's important to have a ridiculously high-def 10 in. display that you can hold up to your face with both hands while watching YouTube porns).

Apple didn't introduce a technology innovation today --- it unveiled a new business model for media content owners. I'd imagine that those giant media corporations --- which actually are people just like you and me, granted --- already have a mighty case of blue balls owing to several years of foreplay. These behemoths have gently been urging Apple (like a thousand tiny fingers) to market a stylish new widget that will seduce foolish young consumers into turning their media collections into a never-ending revenue stream for Time-Warner, Disney, General Electric, and all those other friendly folks who rent you content for your life so you don't have to provide your own.

When I read the description of the iPad today I'm sure I felt the same kind of bile rising as Ralphie did when he discovered that the Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring message was just a lousy commercial. Early Apple geek reaction to the failPad in blog comments threads has been pretty negative (about 2:1, in fact), which is uniformly unheard of after any new Apple rollout.

I may be wrong, but I'll bet anyone a beer that I'm not. I think the reason this new offering is so lame is that it wasn't really designed by Jobs and Jonathan Ives: it was developed for control-horny media conglomerates.

Creeping meatballism (and related Night Person geeking-out)

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While plowing through a surprisingly tedious book about one of my pop culture heroes, radio humorist Jean Shepherd, I came upon a previously unknown (to me) reference to an article dictated by Shepherd for publication in the March-April 1957 "ish" of MAD Magazine. In the article, entitled "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism," Shepherd warns his impressionable readers of a scourge then sweeping the nation --- a menace that threatened to transform America into a race of dimwitted robots who completely identified with The Pepsi Generation. (The text page also has links to graphic facsimiles of the original MAD pages.)

Shepherd's radio audience, The Night People, were fundamentally different than The Day People, but with a role reversal that had the zombies and vampires coming alive with the first drop of Maxwell House Coffee and prowling the earth until Bonanza was over and the kids were tucked in. The Night People were considered outsiders, both by The Day People and by themselves --- alienated, round pegs hammered carelessly halfway into square holes, not "getting it" like The Day People seemed to.

The text may seem tame by today's standards, but I don't believe anyone outside of Harvey Kurtzman and MAD were doing this kind of humor for relatively mainstream readers (albeit The Night People). The content was intended for impressionable adolescents and precocious kids, written by a premier New York City hipster, and Shepherd mean every word of it in grim earnest. To me, Meatballism provides a classic display of Shepherd's prescience regarding the decline and fall of Western Civilization, as it begins with mass conformity and loss of individual identity as driven by mind-colonizing ad agency vermin.

MAD's editorial intro to Shepherd's Meatballism recitation is clearly a fully savored fuck-you to the hapless WOR manager who fired Shepherd a few months earlier for not being commercial enough, and was then immediately forced to hire him back due to a fierce Night People backlash. The MAD editors, writers, and artists were obviously Night People, as were so many of their pimply fans. (And, for that matter, as was Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in New York City, who subsequently introduced an emergent nation of comic book geeks to the cry "Excelsior!", which was a Shepherd trademark.)

Fun Fact No. 1: if you're too young to know who Betty Furness was or why MAD and Shepherd were poking fun at her in Meatballism, then you might miss the irony that Ms. Furness later became a respected consumer rights advocate in the Johnson Administration even though critics felt LBJ had picked a bimbo for the post.

Fun Fact No. 2: Shepherd did not like his first name because, not being short for "Eugene" and being spelled the way the Frenchmen spell it, some Americans in Hammond, Ind., during the Depression perceived it as a "girl" or "sissy" monicker. Shepherd's pal Shel Silverstein immortalized young Jean's plight in the lyrics he penned for Johnny Cash's 1969 hit, "A Boy Named Sue."

So take that, you meatballs!