Category: Social Media

Don’t Touch That File

This weekend I’m going to fly down to Vegas. I’m going to have 3 shots of tequila at McCarran.  Then, I’m going to go to the Consumer Electronics Show.  I’m going walk in the door, go up to the first techie I can find, grab him by his dickie little shirt and slap the living snot out of him.  Then, when he (or she, I don’t give a damn which) is laying semiconscious at my feet, I’m going say — loudly and aggressively — “The next time any one of you sexually repressed mega-mathematicians even thinks about changing Facebook, Google, WordPress, YouTube or anything to do with Microsoft, just remember what happened to this guy, ‘cause if you mess with me again, I’m comin’ back here and I’m bringing Hell with me!”  Then, I’m going to turn on my heel and go have a nice quiet lunch — maybe at the Eiffel Tower.  I’m going to do all this because somebody has got to strike a blow for every one of us ordinary people who is fed up with all this geeky techno-crap.

As you probably don’t know, the Consumer Electronics Show is going on this week.  This is an annual event where a bunch of really, really smart people go to Vegas to gamble on what’s going to be the Next Big Thing in consumer electronics.  (Just as an aside, this year’s no big surprise is tablet computers.)  Anyway, it always works like this.  Every electronics company in the galaxy — except Apple — shows up with their machines (remember, they’re just machines.)   They give one each to any journalist who can spell their company name, along with all the booze and hookers they can consume in seven days.  They take whatever’s left over and throw it to the packs of snarling nerds, waiting outside.  Then they set up their booth, turn on some pasteurized hip hop music, smile for the cameras, and wait for the journalists to sober up.  A week later, they take whatever the nerds didn’t break home with them, assemble 80 million copies and ship them to Costco, Best Buy and Future Shop.  It’s the circle of life, Grasshopper.  I’m content with it.

And this is true.  I really don’t mind re-buying my electronic crap every couple of years.  It’s as inevitable as death and taxes, and I’ve grown to accept it.  I’ve come to realize that the world is spinning a lot faster than it did when I was a kid, and I can’t possibly keep up.  I know, for example, that my phone is now technically smarter than I am (it certainly remembers more than I do) my television is better than being there, and my laptop is so powerful that, if it ever really gets mad, it can reach out and kill me.  I also know that — even as I write this — there’s more new and better stuff getting loaded onto a boat in Asia, and by the time it gets here, it’s going to be way cheaper than the last stuff I bought.   Once again, the circle of life, Grasshopper, and I’m content with that, too.  There will be no punches thrown.

The thing that has finally driven me to violence, however, is that smart-ass techie who’s busy changing all the applications out from underneath me – practically over lunch.  You go to something like Facebook, (connecting with friends and family) to tell them you’re doing important stuff like eating spaghetti, and you can’t recognize  the page you used less than an hour ago!  Some jerk in Loma Lonely, California, has changed it.  (I know Jessica Alba doesn’t answer your Tweets, but don’t take it out on me.)  Everything has a different name, and it’s in a different place, and you can’t get there from here, anyway.  It’s like waking up in the morning and finding out your toaster has forgotten how to make toast.  (Bread goes in the top?  Bread goes in the side?  Where the hell does the bread go?)  Nobody is going to convince me that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 are so radically different that the whole configuration had to change.  There was junk on XP that I never figured out, and I’m sure there was stuff on Vista that was born, lived and died and not one person on this planet even knew it was there.

There are only 3 people in this world under the age of 100 who don’t care about computer technology: The Pope, The Dalai Lama, and Stephen Jobs’ mom.  The other 6.8 billion of us need computers to function — every single day — so it would be in everybody’s best interest to set some standards and quit changing things around once a week.  Believe me, if something isn’t done pretty soon, I’m not the only one who’s going to show up in Vegas with a bad attitude.

O: the ever-expanding universe

At high noon, January 1st, 2011, the Evil Queen of Daytime TV took one more step toward total world domination when she launched the Oprah Winfrey Network.  This will not be her last territorial demand.  In the last 25 years, Oprah has single-handedly done more damage to the equality of the sexes than Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton combined.   Her brand of Jell-o Journalism has overflowed its mid-western bowl and slopped squishy, sweet goo and celebrity worship over every aspect of society.  And her abnormal obsession with the cult of her own personality has enlisted millions of followers who delight in publically stroking their own egos.  In short, Oprah Winfrey isn’t the Anti-Christ, but I can’t tell the difference.

Phil Donahue invented Jell-o Journalism in the 1970s. What he did was take regular news items and real public issues and tone them down, broaden them out and smooth off the hard edges.  He manipulated the questions to produce an emotion rather than an answer and carefully presented the information to elicit a strong response.  His show pretended to be about hard news and bold discussion.  However, in actuality, it was merely entertainment built on simplistic, preconceived conclusions that seemed to come from his own strong emotional attachment to the subject at hand.   Although he invented the genre, Phil was never very good at it.  He couldn’t produce the single tear for the whimpering puppy — or the spontaneous outrage at the abusive husband.  He just didn’t have it.  He was kind of a Fisher-Price version of Dr. Phil and Sally Jesse Raphael.  So, when Oprah challenged his reign on tabloid TV, he didn’t stand a chance.  She could weep on command and giggle like a schoolgirl.  She had just the right combination of concern and anger, and her indignation was something to behold.   As a result, in the Chi-town Media Grudge Match, held about 25 years ago, Oprah Winfrey kicked Donahue’s ass so badly he had to unbuckle his belt to burp.  Phil’s mistake was that he failed to recognize the ruthlessness of his opponent.  Oprah Winfrey syndicated her TV show nationally, and the Oprah Universe was born.

In the Oprah Universe, Oprah is everywhere.  If she were a South American dictator, the State Department would be concerned about her cult of personality.  She’s on cable TV, 4 and 5 times a day, depending on your time zone.  She’s on Satellite Radio. She’s online anytime you want her.  She has been on the cover of every single issue of her magazine for 10 years.  She has only shared it twice — once with Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States, and once with Ellen Degeneres, perpetual sycophant.  Even Stalin took a day off every once in a while.  Oprah Winfrey has become “Oprah” the one word solution to every problem.  And how did she get there?  By doing what Phil wouldn’t do: selling out a whole generation of women for television ratings.

Oprah’s media presence is based on one simple premise — self help — the ability to change your life.  Of course, the un-named assumption is that women (the majority of Oprah’s audience) are all screwed up in the first place.  She has built her empire on the insecurities of middle-class women and made hundreds of millions of dollars doing it.  The Oprah Winfrey Show follows a very simple pattern: the question is posed and the solution is given.  In her time on TV, Oprah has championed everything from diets to angels, and exercise to something called The Secret which apparently radiates good vibrations from positive thoughts.  And these get-fixed-quick schemes are all in the name of the inadequacies of women. 

Here are some headlines from just one O Magazine, March 2007.

“Too Tall, Too Small, Too big all over?”
“5 Wildly Unexpected Ways to Get Happier”
“Will the Real You Please Stand Up!  How to know what you actually want, think, love”

The entire magazine is devoted to readers who, first of all, don’t like their body image; secondly, are unhappy; and finally, quite frankly don’t even know what they wanted to begin with.  What an incredibly sexist view of women!  And this is just one issue of the magazine.  They’re all the same — every month.  For an entire generation, Oprah and her minions have been pounding away at these same themes — under the nicey-nicey guise of “empowering” women to change their lives.  Meanwhile, Oprah’s Universe has established beyond any doubt that day after day, month after month, women need to be repaired and the wonderful thing is Oprah herself, is going to help them do it – pop psychology DIY.

If you were an alien and watched Oprah for any length of time, you would naturally assume that the females of our species are all fat, dumb and unhappy, not to mention stressed out at every opportunity.  According to Oprah, everything from dinner parties to getting up in the morning is a minefield that women must first diligently navigate and then hopelessly recover from.

What do girls born into this mess think?   Do they believe their lives are going to be nothing more than a relentless war against body fat followed by the daily wardrobe crisis?   If this is help, let me outta here?  But Oprah won’t let you out.  She’s gone wall-to-wall – 25/8 – on an entire television network — soft core promo for the Ubiquitous Oprah.

 We can only pray that her next stop won’t be politics.

Grog and his New Year’s Resolution

Every year, at about this time, I take a pen (remember those?) and a piece of paper and write:  “New Year’s Resolutions” and whatever year is bursting on the horizon.  I write #1 and then I write “Be more ruthless.”  There’s always a bunch of other, currently important resolutions, that may or may not matter next year, but I’m convinced that, over the course of several years, I will actually become more ruthless, simply by writing it down once a year.  That’s the power of New Year’s resolutions — it could happen.   New Year’s Resolutions are that idea that we can somehow be better — if we just set our mind to it.  And we can.  Primitive man knew this and acted accordingly.

For example, in Europe, back in the caveman days, there were two groups of people: the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals.  They were both basic knuckle-draggers, but there is one important difference.  The Cro-Magnon people survived and the Neanderthals died out.  Why?  I’m convinced that the Cro-Magnon understood the concept of improvement.  It’s pretty far-fetched to consider a bunch of Cro-Magnons sitting around the cave making plans to go to the gym or start an RRSP, but in caveman terms, I think that’s exactly what they did.  Meanwhile, the Neanderthal hillbillies down the block were picking their noses and wondering why they never seemed to get ahead.  If you multiply that situation by, let’s say, 30 thousand years, Darwin and his theory kick in, and suddenly the Neanderthals are wondering where all their friends went.  On the other hand, the Cro-Magnons have all the cool stuff — like circles and pointy sticks and the missionary position.  The layers of knowledge build up, and before you know it, your species is evolving.  In essence, the reason the Cro-Magnon people are the roots of our family tree and the Neanderthals are bones in a museum is that the Cro-Magnons learned how to do things better.  They also knew there was a thing called tomorrow.

Here’s the deal: it’s December 31st, no year (because they didn’t have them.)  Grog is sitting around the cave.  Mrs. Grog and the kids are huddled over in the corner, shivering and bitchin’ because it’s cold.  Gender equality wasn’t an issue in those days, so it’s Grog’s job to go out in the snow to get wood for the fire.  Grog grunts and groans and hollers and stomps around, but he does it; it’s a matter of survival.  When everybody’s toasty warm again, Grog is still thinking about how much he hates going out in the cold to get wood.  He’s just a little bit smarter than the average Cro-Magnon, so he understands that the snow is eventually going to go away and wood gathering is going to be a lot easier.  But — and this is way more important — he also knows that the snow is cunning, and it always comes back.  Ding dong!  The light goes on!   Grog says to himself, “Wait a minute!  If I get those useless kids to gather wood all summer, when it’s easy, and pile it over in the corner of the cave, I won’t have to go out in the cold to get it when the snow comes back.”  So Grog “resolves” to gather wood next year or make the kids do it.  Grog has a pile more time in the winter to do things like sharpen his pointy sticks (which makes hunting a lot better.)  The family eats better and more often.  At some point, Grog’s neighbours, two caves down, are going to see this and either put two and two together or ask, “Hey, Grog! You lookin’ fat, dumb and happy.  What’s your secret?”  The family Grog and the whole tribe are on the road to evolution because Grog’s kids are going to grow up and make their kids gather wood, too — “just like I did when I was your age.” From there, it’s only a matter of time before somebody’s going to decide that it would be kinda cool if a guy from Ohio took a stroll on the moon.

That’s why we make resolutions and why — every year — I write them down.  It’s not that I keep them (or even remember some of them) but we all have to try: the survival of our species depends on it.