Um… (#2)
Clearly I didn’t think this through. I now have to write a six-volume
series chock full of appalling characters just to satisfy all the people who
wrote me annoying “Um…” e-mails. It was meant to be a deterrent, dammit!
Now stop it!
0 commentsUm…
Okay, that’s enough. At first I thought this was kind of funny. Then
it wasn’t so funny, then it got irritating, and now it makes me want to hurt
someone. I’m talking about the practice of starting a post with “Um.”
This is particularly virulent on technically-inclined mailing lists and forums. It goes like this: a person posts something—a comment, a question, anything—and some other guy thinks they’re wrong. But he doesn’t just come out and say that, oh no. First he says: “Um…” Like this: “Um… Word won’t run on Linux.”
This is meant to convey the impression that the initial post was so mind-numbingly stupid that at first he couldn’t believe it was actually meant in earnest. Then, as he began to phrase his reply, he had to pause to ratchet down his intelligence a few levels so that the drooling simpleton who had uttered such idiocy would be able to comprehend it. This created a pause which had to be filled by “Um.”
Only that’s not what happened at all. If you’re having an actual conversation with someone, sure, you might say “um.” But if you’re typing out a post, what the hell are you doing? Are your fingers operating independently of your brain? No! You’re just being an asshole!
Maybe I could deal with this if it only happened when genuinely brilliant people wrote messages to real morons. After all, geniuses aren’t supposed to have social skills. But it happens all the time. This is the exchange that finally sent me over the edge:
#1: Happily seen that Gentoo has released 2004.2. I’m now using 2004.0 and I wonder whether it is necessary for me to migrate to 2004.2 from 2004.0.
#2: Uh.. if you do an “emerge -uD world” then you too will have all the bonus’s of 2004.2…
#3: Really? I think simply doing this won’t change my /etc/make.profile. It’ll be still point to ../usr/portage/profiles/default-x86-2004.0, isn’t it?
#4: Um, its a symlink… change it to point to the new profile
No! No! Not “Um!” The first guy was right, goddamn it! You can’t “um” him when he’s right! What is this um doing? It’s a totally unjustified um!
This is a cancer of the internet, I tell you, and it’s got to be stopped. Please. I can’t take much more.
(P.S. If anyone writes me an e-mail like “Um… Word can run on Linux if you use an emulator,” I’m going to name a really bad character after them.)
Everybody just left the room
The commission investigating the September 11 attacks
has
released tape recordings of some of the conversations from that day.
Among them was one of the most powerful pieces of dialogue I’ve heard in
years. I have no jokes or political points to make here; I just want to
talk about the actual words.
The situation was this: within the last 50 minutes, two hijacked airlines had struck the World Trade Center in New York, a third had crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and a fourth was being tracked. The national Air Traffic Control System Command Center contacted the FAA headquarters to suggest military jets be used to intercept this fourth aircraft.
Many people have said that 9/11 felt like a Hollywood movie. If it had been, the scene would have gone like this:
TRAFFIC CONTROL GUY
Do we want to think about scrambling
aircraft?
FAA OFFICIAL
Way ahead of you.
PULL BACK to reveal out of man's office window,
two F-15s screaming off a runway.
Or, perhaps, this:
JACK RYAN
You guys need to scramble aircraft,
now!
FAA OFFICIAL
You don't run the FAA, Mr. Ryan. I do.
And I'm not spending twenty thousand
dollars in jet fuel just because you've
got a point to prove!
CLOSE UP on RYAN as his jaw clenches with
frustration.
This is popcorn entertainment, escapism. There is nothing wrong with that; I often enjoy a good dose. But what I love even more are tiny moments of realistic human failing: when a person does something unthinking, or gets confused. These are touching simply because they’re real and recognizable. Humans make a lot of mistakes. Our lives are not scripted, and if we could yell “cut” and do over every bit of our lives we weren’t happy with, we’d all still be in our teens.
That’s why this little exchange is, for me, almost heart-breakingly tragic.
Air Traffic Control: “Do we want to think about, uh, scrambling aircraft?”
FAA: “God… I don’t know.”
Air Traffic Control: “That’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.”
FAA: “Uh… you know, everybody just left the room.”
Max reviews the classics: Mary-Kate and Ashley #20
Last night I took a break from re-reading
Cryptonomicon
to pick
up a book roughly as long as one of its paragraphs:
Sealed With a Kiss, by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
It was number 20 in a series, so at first I wasn’t sure if I would be
able to follow the story-line without having read the previous 19, but
luckily these fears turned out to be unfounded. It was a cracking read,
full of hope and joy and heart-breaking pathos, so I’m sharing it
with you.
Here’s the blurb:
Mary-Kate and Ashley can’t wait to go home for winter break. But they wind up stuck in a Harrington University dorm instead.
Things start to look up when the girls meet a new boy with a romantic holiday secret…
You see why I was intrigued. The book’s first sentence alone raised a series of perplexing questions:
“We’re going home to Chicago for only two weeks!” Mary-Kate Burke told her sister Ashley.
First, who, exactly, reads the 20th book in the Mary-Kate and Ashley series without realizing they’re sisters? I mean, setting aside the possibility that the previous 19 books have been keeping this a secret, and that the reader has thus far been unexposed to mainstream media, the book’s cover shot is of two remarkably similar-looking girls. Isn’t that a giveaway? If you’re worried about readers that stupid, you probably need to point out that they’re twins, too.
Second, I can’t help but wonder what percentage of Mary-Kate and Ashley books contain an exclamation point in the first sentence. I haven’t checked, but I get the feeling it’s a high number.
Third, and most intriguing: Mary-Kate Burke. The authors of this book—and it says so on the cover, so it must be true—are Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. I’d thought this was some kind of tell-all autobiography, but apparently not. It turns out that Mary-Kate and Ashley books feature characters called Mary-Kate and Ashley that look exactly like them but are, in fact, fictional. I hope you get that, because I had to stop and think about it for a while. Whenever I came across passages like this:
“Why can’t you just get another flight, Cheryl?” Ashley asked.
“On what—Santa’s sleigh?” Cheryl grumbled. “It’s the holidays. All the flights are already booked.”
I thought, “Well, just send your private jet, Ashley!” Then I had to remind myself that fictional Ashley doesn’t have a jet. People complain that movies and computer games blur the line between fantasy and reality; I say, start with Mary-Kate and Ashley. After reading this book, I’m no longer sure if they even exist. I mean, think about it: first there was just one of them, on that TV show Full House, then they split into twins; now, apparently, they have divided again, into the Olsens and Burkes. They’re actually spinning themselves off. Either that or they’re some kind of mutant virus, and unless we do something, there will soon be eight of them, then 16, then they’ll destroy mankind.
But back to the book. It quickly became apparent that Ashley was the more entertaining twin, getting all the good lines:
“Wait!” Ashley cried out. “I forgot to pack my bathing suit and flip-flops!”
“Bathing suit?” Mary-Kate shrieked. “But the winters in Chicago are ice-cold!”
“There are indoor pools,” Ashley said.
Snap! Good work. The book really started to move along when the twins’ Chicago holiday plans were dashed and they were forced to move into a dorm with four boys. Hoping to recover from the indoor pools comment, Mary-Kate stepped to the fore:
“I hope you like Twister,” Mary-Kate said.
“What’s that?” Derek asked.
“It’s a game!” Mary-Kate said.
“Does it run on double-A batteries?” Tyrone asked.
“How impressive is its resolution?” Derek asked.
“Does it include a thirty-two-bit RISC-CPU with embedded memory?” Garth asked.
They’re computer geeks! (And Derek’s surname is “Wang,” so extra funny.) This was a startling development. I knew that large sections of the internet were writing fantasy fiction about the Olsen twins; I didn’t know the reverse was also true. But then, with adulthood approaching, I guess they have to manage the transition of their fan base from pubescent girls to lecherous men.
The inclusion of geeks as love interest had me hooked, and I couldn’t wait to find out how the twins would manage to pry them away from their computers. (“Stop posting about how you’re about to kiss one of the Olsen twins, Derek, and just kiss me!”) But then a new figure entered the scene. He was Colton, and I knew he was trouble because his clothes were described (“cuffed jeans, black sweater, and grey trainers with black stripes”—which, incidentally, boldly puts an Americanism in “sweater” right next to two Briticisms in “grey trainers”). Colton looked “like those models in the Gap ads.” He skateboarded, snuck through tunnels, cooked pizza muffins, and his great-grandmother invented the pencil eraser. Or so he said. It quickly became apparent that Colton was a pathological liar. Ashley picked this up straight away, but Mary-Kate was blinded by infatuation.
Alas, if only they’d gone to the geeks, a few minutes Googling would have punched holes in Colton’s story. But no. Old fashioned Scooby-style investigation ensued, with plenty of creeping around in tunnels. At one point, the book got into a bit of trouble when the story required that the twins and two other girls return to the tunnels, but there was no motivation for them to do so. Authors hit situations like this from time to time, and I tell you, it can be a struggle. The solution to this one, though, was pure genius:
“I am not going back down to those tunnels,” Cheryl declared. “I’m tired of sneaking around.”
“Me, too,” Kirsten agreed.
“We have to go back,” Elise said in a small voice.
Everyone turned to look at Elise.
“I dropped my Peppermint Pink blusher in the tunnel,” she explained. “It must have fallen out of my sweatshirt pocket last night.”
“Why can’t you just buy another one?” Kirsten asked.
“Because,” Elise said, “Peppermint Pink was discontinued last month.”
Down in the tunnels, Ashley got off another zinger:
“Wait!” Mary-Kate said. She pointed to a narrow tunnel. “I know we never went through this one.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Ashley blurted out.
So Mary-Kate was already steamed when they discovered Colton’s secret: he was the son of the tyrannical Headmaster! His full name was Colton Harrington III, he was stinking rich, and he’d lied non-stop to them since they met. This, you’d expect, would be when Mary-Kate slapped him, realized how she’d overlooked the gentle love of the geeks, and learnt a few life lessons about untrustworthy men who look like Gap models. But no: in the greatest love tragedy since Molly Ringwald chose Andrew McCarthy over Jon “Duckie” Cryer, she fell into Colton’s arms. There the book unexpectedly ended; I say unexpectedly because there were still dozens of pages left but they turned out to be full of advertisements for other Mary-Kate and Ashley books.
But wait! All was not completely lost for the geeks. They missed out on the twins, but in the final scene Garth scored a slow dance with one of their hangers-on, Kirsten. Alas, even this was tinged with tragedy. Kirsten quickly complained that Garth was “more into computer games than smooching,” and thus the relationship seemed doomed. Oh well, at least it was realistic.
Vote 1 The Other Guy
There’s no question in my mind that George W. Bush has been great for democracy.
Previously, a lot of people were becoming disillusioned with mainstream politics,
frustrated at having to choose between one corporate-backed rich white guy with
good hair and another, slightly different-looking corporate-backed rich white guy
with good hair. The feeling was: “What difference does it make if I vote? They’re
all the same. What will one guy do that the other won’t?”
Thanks to Bush, now we know. He’s like a walking object lesson in the importance of voter turnout.
I’m Australian, but one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen was a rally outside City Hall in New York in 1999 to protest the police shooting of Amandou Diallo. Thousands of people voicing their grief and outrage… all quietly and competently supervised by the target of their protest, the NYPD. In plenty of countries, the cops would have been beating the crap out of those protestors. In the others, the protesters would have been throwing rocks at the cops and setting their cruisers on fire. But not in the United States. It was, to me, not just impressive but almost magical.
Then there was September 11. In the aftermath, there was a global outpouring of grief and sympathy for Americans—and more than that, of allegiance. If you lived in the US, you might not have noticed this. Your attention was, of course, focused inward. But it was there, and it was extraordinary. It was overwhelming. What I heard over and over was, “Today, we are all Americans.” Throughout the world, people wanted to stand by the US.
I wonder now what might have happened if the war on terrorism had chiefly been a diplomatic one. If the Bush administration had defined what terrorism was and called the world together to expunge it—not just in one country or two, but globally, and no matter in which cause it was employed. In 2001, with that incredible worldwide feeling of unity… maybe it was possible to take that act of great evil and extract from it a great good.
But it’s not possible now. That global unity is gone, and in its place is cynicism and mistrust. It happened because George W. Bush told the world it was irrelevant. As the war on terrorism morphed into an invasion of Iraq, Bush and his administration said it again and again: “You either agree with us or you are meaningless.” Maybe it was ignorance of the importance of international diplomacy. Maybe it was arrogance. Maybe it was even realistic. But one thing’s for sure: the world had offered its hand in solidarity and it didn’t like having it slapped away.
Opinion of the US has fallen so low that America is now widely viewed as the greatest threat to world peace—not just by people in “Axis of Evil” countries, or Muslim countries, but by majority populations in Western countries, like Australia, that are staunch US allies and have troops in Iraq right now. That sounds absurd if you live in the States, I know. But to understand it, imagine you don’t. Imagine it’s China that has more military power than the next 20 countries plus yours combined; China’s new government that rapidly cancels international treaties on everything from anti-missile proliferation to global warming; that announces it has no use nor care for world opinion; that conquers two countries in two years and hints of more to come; China that says other countries must choose to either support it without question or be “with the terrorists;” and China’s new President who describes entire nations as “evil” and his country’s military operations in religious terms.
I hate how the US is viewed by the world today. America is a truly great country, and doesn’t deserve to be considered deceitful, dangerous, arrogant, and greedy. But it is, because in the eyes of the world, George W. Bush is the US. It’s not as if we foreigners watch CNN. All we know about American politics is who’s President and how many bombs he’s dropping on other countries.
Which is why I hope like hell that John Kerry wins the election this November. If he does, people around the world won’t know it had anything to do with who had the better service record, or was more credible on jobs. But they’ll think, “Maybe Americans didn’t agree with Bush after all.” They’ll think, “Maybe they’re not all like him.” They’ll think, “Maybe we can stand together again.”
On Your Face Advertising
Another day, another company tattooing itself onto people’s foreheads.
This is why I love marketing: it’s not just shameless, it’s shameless
and imitative. In 2003
it
was Dunkin’ Donuts, now it’s Toyota taking the word “brand” too
literally and slapping Scion logos and prices onto
40 human foreheads
in Times Square.
“This is the first time we’ve used foreheads,” says Toyota exec Brian Bolain, which is, just quietly, not a sentence you want to put into your press releases, Brian; not ever, not about anything. It sounds like there could be a second time; like forehead billboards could be the next big thing in advertising real estate. Presumably companies will pay varying rates for foreheads, based on available space (low hairlines equals low pay, people with fringes need not apply) and smoothness of texture (perhaps a deduction per zit).
But wait! I’m forgetting the most important part: attractiveness. Because the point of forehead advertising is to embed the brand into the human host, so it becomes the most whole-hearted product endorsement ever. A person wearing a corporate tattoo says: I like this product so much, it’s literally oozing out of my skin! You don’t want uglies walking around embodying your product; if you’re buying human flesh by the inch, you want the good stuff. The nice-looking stuff.
In the Ad Age report, Josh Tierney, one of the walking corporate billboards, says, “It is a little compromising.” Getting the tattoo, that is. The logo tattoo. Tattooed on his forehead. Josh strikes me as the kind of guy you want around when your plane crashes in the Andes and you need to pick someone to eat; he’d complain, but only a little.
I have no doubt that this was pitched to Josh as a bit of fun: make some money, do something silly, why not? Don’t worry about concepts like dignity and individuality: you can have them back when you’re done. But look at the pic of the two marketing geniuses who convinced him, standing in Times Square as their forty Frankenstein Inc’s monsters roam around. Decent-looking guys. Nice, wide, smooth foreheads. But whaddya know? No tattoos.
