I know, I know, it’s old. But it’s damn funny. If airlines normally ran ads like this they’d never have an empty seat.
Yes. I. Went. There.
Category Archives: marketing
drunkblogging FTW!
What, exactly, does it say about me that I make more sense, using more complex syntax and a more sophisticated vocabulary, when I’m drunk than when I’m sober?
The proof:
Once I sober up from the cheap Cab Sauv, I’ll come back with something useful, but for now think of it like this:
I have both the Manual of Afghani Jihad and the Japanese Kamikaze Manual documents, and I have done a presentation around the fact that both of these put technology in a spiritual context. The central thesis of that presentation is that if Western, secular military forces had something that spiritually compelling we would have no recruiting or morale problems.Apple, for good or ill, offers that spiritual dimension, and has done so since the “do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world” days.Respect.
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The Greatest Ho
I’m on a kick. I get that way sometimes; there’s no point trying to stop me if you, yourself, do not want to be kicked, whether in the privates, in the majors, or curb-wards (kerb-wards for our overseas readers!) you just have to stand clear. Sometimes I get it in my head to watch every silent vampire film ever made and nothing, not even the unforgivable barrenness of the upper steppes of YouTube, can stop me.
Not as long as I’ve got Videomatica!
Seriously, though, I’ve seen Nosferatu so often that I can tell within three notes who did the score for this version and surely if it had words I’d recite them along with the actors. As it is, I make do with gesticulating in unison and making the hand-in-the-air-taco-sqeezing move at that point in the Clubfoot Orchestra score where the Squeeze Taco comes into play.
Ah, memories.
Now, when I was in school these kicks of mine, or obsessions if you will or even if you won’t, because they’re mine and I get to say what they are, were useful in a way and after a fashion and before curfew, because every year I had a new topic for the Science Fair or the Essay Bonspiel or the What Have You Arbitrary Competition To Teach Our Kids That Not Everyone Can Be A Winnner (except, at my school, the two grade six girls who were sleeping with the gym teacher, who won everything right up until they transferred to high school and had to start learning for the first time and never caught up) and usually a highly-charged enthusiasm therefor, unlike most of the others who took the assignment home and moped until their Moms told them what to write.
One year it was Nessie.
One year it was cloud formations.
One year it was castles.
Okay, three years.
One year it was, and this was University by this time, or even post-University, although with me there was about a decade and a half when I was post- one University and pre- another. It’s complicated.
Does that surprise you?
In any case, one year when I was out of high school but still quite youthful it was this dude. This dude with this thing. I didn’t know what it did, exactly, nor what it would do to me, nor how many other people were in line ahead of me. I didn’t know there was no going back. I didn’t know that things would be different from then on. I just knew that I wanted it. Oh, how many times have we all heard some maudlin, emo variation on this eternal melody, eh?
Did I get it? Oh, not just then, but I’m a patient sort (I have a straight face right now, how about you?) and eventually that which I wished to write apon the world manifested, if secondhand. Sigh, story of my life.
Well, only 50% of it did, because all I got was the computer.
In the age-old rite of passage of women everywhere, I eventually concluded that the actual fellow was too dense to deserve me, possibly psychotic, and possessed of marginal personal hygene besides, and moved on.
No, we really do this.
Also gay. He’s totally gay. Don’t let all those kids fool you; he got them off eBay or something.
Where was I? Oh, yes, did I tell you I’m still on painkillers? But that’s neither here nor there, it’s mostly just in the shoulderblade and the right side of the neck.
Right. Now, I had another enthusiasm once. In fact, I was that person for this enthusiasm, that person where, if you know you’ve got to be at your movie premiere or an awards thingy or something you stop, cold, and say, “Oh. She’ll be there, won’t she? Pilar, help me!” or words to that effect. And I forget why I brought that up.
Oh yes.
Because my friend Dale said, “You like Sean Bean? You should check out Viggo; he’s much more your kinda thing. He paints and writes poetry and he’s quite political,” and I thought, oh yes, poetry? Like:
Jewel-Sean Penn-Hollywood-type-celebrity-poetry? Oh yes. And then I checked it out and realized he actually wrote it himself instead of getting some poor D Girl (not related, or at least only very tangentially, to B Girl) and I read it again and realized it was actually very, very good, and I was a goner for about twenty-four months. Enthusiasms were so much easier before puberty, I must say.
So, for the record: poetry. Poetry totally works.
But by the time the final installment of LOTR and the restraining order were served, I had learned to make do with mere representations of my enthusiasm; samizdat copies of Darkly Noon or American Yakuza, the odd Aragorn standee, and, when I want a bit of buzzkill, the man’s music.
So it is with Steve Jobs: given that he’s apparently happily married, lives in a different country, doesn’t know I’m alive, and has a really flat and boring LiveJournal, I’m going to make do with a replicant.
Hey, wasn’t there an Ann Magnusen movie about that?
So: it turns out that Fake Steve Jobs is quite a poet. Only rarely is he inspired to Calliopean efforts, much less Eratoran or those of Euterpicacity, but rather usually actually prefers to produce Melpomeneian art if it comes right down to it, for he’s a great writer of funeral poems.
For indeed, nothing says “dead” like a literary memorial of a certain standard.
And so to his moving tribute to Don Ho:
“Tiny Bubbles.”
That was your famous song.
But others made more money on it.
Bastards!
Still, you were the most
famous Ho in Hollywood.
And that is saying something.
Honestly, it brings a tear to the eye, does it not? But that’s nothing compared to what he wrote as a sendoff for Evel Knievel:
Jon Ive says if someone crashed
that much in our business
they wouldn’t call you “world’s greatest.”
They’d call you Microsoft. Or Windows.
A bit unkind of him, I think.
Because you inspired people.
Including me. One time,
when I was thirteen, I built
a ramp on my street
& put on a cape
& a football helmet
& tried to jump a Schwinn Stingray
over three kindergarten kids.
Each kid lay on the pavement
holding a pair of enormous torches —
rolled-up newspapers doused in gasoline.
Flames leapt eight feet into the air.
Soon after this
as a condition of my parole
I joined my school’s electronics club.
The rest, as they say,
is history.
Once more, for old time’s sake, here’s Don Ho doing Peter Gabriel‘s Shock the Monkey.
Because no, you never CAN get enough.
What’s your spammer name?
Makes total sense to me:
My Spammer Name is:
Meningitis G. Switchgear.
(What’s your spammer name?)
Stolen from SeismicTwitch
Now the question becomes, what do I spam for? I’m thinking Canadian pharmaceutical anti-inflammatories for overheated engines?
Are YOU a spammer? Take the Spammer Quiz from Spammers Anonymous and find out.
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Ritalin: Breakfast of Champeens
Yep, this is pretty much how it is lately.
From Worth1000.com’s Fun With Propaganda contest
In Soviet Canuckistan, Fun has YOU! I don’t know what it means, but I’m a little fried lately so I’ll take what I can get, inspiration-wise. This could ramble; you’ve been warned.
Is this the time to mention (will there ever be another time?) that my mother was on Ritalin for years; or rather, she was prescribed Ritalin for years (and remember the episode of Star Trek, the original series I’m talking here, none of this Under the Planet of the Son of Deep Sixing the Next Generation crap, puh-leez, in which Ritalin had a supporting role? And didn’t even die in the climax, although it did get eaten I think? That was pretty edgy for Star Trek
See, narcolepsy means never having to say you’re actually boring me to sleep. Narcoleptics fall asleep basically any time their focus wanders, particularly during repetitive activities such as oh, say, driving, which is why it’s illegal for a narcoleptic to have a driver’s license and why Mother always dragged me or my sister around when she had to drive somewhere. And narcoleptics lose muscle control when they laugh; they don’t pee themselves, but they are entirely capable of collapsing to the floor like fainting goats during a George Carlin
Ritalin. It’s a blog post about Ritalin.
So, basically, for a narcoleptic the effect of Ritalin is the opposite of what it is on a normal person or (and you may make of this what you will) its effect on someone suffering from ADD or AHDHDHD or whatever it is they are calling it today. So, basically narcoleptics’ baseline of alertness goes up when they’re on the stuff, while everyone else’s goes down. And I guess my mother woke up, took a look around, and preferred to go back to sleep again, and who among us can say we never felt the same, eh? I ask you.
And this is definitely the point at which to bring up Tom Wolfe
Anyone with a child in school knows the signs all too well. I have children in school, and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest–the craze began about 1990–in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this “disorder” is an actual, physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy–forty-nine out of fifty cases are boys–fidgets around in school, slides off his chair, doesn’t pay attention, distracts his classmates during class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured to pay attention, work harder, show some self-discipline. To parents caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach seems cruel, because my little boy’s problem is… he’s wired wrong! The poor little tyke –the fix has been in since birth! Invariably the parents complain, “All he wants to do is sit in front of the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis.” For how long? “How long? For hours at a time.” Hours at a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
Quite so.
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raincoaster 