Everybody In The Pool
Friday, June 01, 2007 • 04:22:09 PM EDT
Memo to the ad agency that puts together TV commercials for Old Navy:
As you're no doubt aware, in 2003 I was forced to impose a rare, dreaded, but completely-justified Life Ban on all Old Navy products and services, due to years and years of relentlessly-annoying commercials for the Old Navy brand. "They're not annoying," your panel of representatives insisted to me and my independent arbitrators during the compulsory appeals hearing. "They're, like, kitschy and campy and post-modern hip/ironic and stuff…like the first five or six years of Letterman's NBC show. Remember?"
"I don't recall Letterman ever making me want to throw a lamp at the TV screen because I couldn't find the remote and I was that desperate to end this evil, evil display of tectonic idiocy," I replied. And then a fire siren cranked up and Sandman Simms ran out, swatted you all in the behinds with a comically-large broom until you fled the stage in shame, and then he did a little triumphant dance to the hoots and cheers of a clearly-thankful Apollo audience.
If you've blocked the experience out — and really, who could blame you? — the video is available on YouTube, where it's attracted over 450,000 unique views and spawned a slew of imitators.
However, the purpose of the Life Ban is not punitive but educational. It is my sincere hope that folks in your industry will take it as a valuable lesson...as powerful motivation to identify, isolate and eradicate past mistakes and to walk away from the experience as better advertisers for the tears that you have shed.
IE, yes, you have lost me as a consumer, but it is never to late to repent. I don't want you to stop making commercials; I simply want you to stop making such horrible ones.
But clearly, the purpose of this exercise wasn't lost on you. Because this latest campaign of yours makes me very, very proud.
This is the level of style, excellence, and effective messaging that I knew you were capable of all along. Whereas the ads with Sherman Helmsley and Morgan Fairchild swooning bizarrely about fleece vests were the work of desperate amateurs, these commercials — well, there's just the one so far, but I'm hopeful that there are more to come — show the confident and steady hand of a seasoned team of qualified professionals. Creative men and women who understand that an effective television commercial is a carefully-negotiated synergy between the precision goals of a marketing campaign and the eternal rules of good entertainment.
I am therefore very pleased to announce that the Old Navy Life Ban has been lifted. To commemorate this occasion, before this weekend is out I shall buy a sensibly-priced pair of adequately-tailored, not-quite-off-brand jeans.
The swish of a blade...
Saturday, June 02, 2007 • 12:41:52 AM EDT
As a public service to my many readers who are at profound risk of getting far too much done on this Saturday, I present the following imagery:
Charles Nelson-Reilly and Paul Lynde confronting each other in Heaven, and finally having the Highlander-style showdown that was postponed by Lynde's 1982 heart attack. They are armed with period claymores but otherwise they're wearing their familiar 1970's gameshow haberdashery.
("There can BE…only (hahhnn-hahhnn-hahhnnnn!)…ONE!!!")
There. That ought to take care of you for the next twenty minutes.
Snappy Answers to Sensible Questions
Monday, June 04, 2007 • 12:22:27 AM EDT
A pal of mine just got back after a week's vacation on a luxury cruise ship. Seven days, fine accomodations, terrific food with 24-hour all-you-can-eat availability, exotic ports of call.
I was very correct to be jealous.
He iChatted me this morning. "We had terrible luck all week," he sighed. "It rained at every port, so our excursions weren't very fun. And when we were at sea, the ocean was so rough that everybody pretty much had to stay in their cabins all the time."
It can be difficult to offer sympathy and acknowledge the suffering of someone who spent a week on a cruise, but I dug down deep and found the strength.
"So how was your weekend?" he asked, after reciting the automated Norovirus warnings that came through the ship's PA system every 90 minutes.
I dragged a JPEG from my Pictures folder into the iChat window:
"Taken on Saturday morning, probably when you were lining up to reclaim your luggage at the cruise terminal" I wrote.
More photos from the Newport Chowder Cook-Off will be posted to Flickr later this week, after I finish sorting and adjusting them in Aperture. It's slow going, because I've decided to quit Adobe Lightroom (my usual RAW photo library manager and editor) cold-turkey so I can finally become less-dumb about this other app. But the learning curve is flattening out at a cheerful rate and I'm liking it more and more as I go along.
Call Key Operator Call Key Operator Call Key...
Friday, June 15, 2007 • 01:45:36 PM EDT
Sorry to drop such terrible news on you all — particularly on that glorious Flag Day-Fathers' Day five-day weekend — but it definitely appears as though Satan has tapped his baton on his lectern and the overture to the Age of the Machines has begun. You have to concede that all of these wretched technical problems coming down on the same day is damned odd.
Yesterday morning, I finally got around to installing Ubuntu Linux on that HP notebook I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Linux is a swell OS and Ubuntu is almost certainly the friendliest distro ever. But the cuddliest iguana at the pet store is still covered with spiky bits and dry, sandpapery skin. Propagandists will lie to you and claim that the word "Linux" is a whimsical perversion of its creator's first name. As an internationally-beloved technology pundit I can state with authority that this is mere spin. It's actually an acronym for "Let's just tease the user with a fantastic free OS with plenty of potential, and then we'll drive him slowly mad as he begins the dull, depressing grind of trying to cajole it into acknowledging all of his PC's existing ports, controllers, and accessories."
"But that doesn't collapse to 'LINUX'," you note. "Also, isn't that, like, way too many letters?"
The Linux propagandist would shake his head and give one of those low, "you poor, pathetic bastard" chuckles. Then he'd explain it to you in the same tone of voice one would use with a 6-year-old child who wonders why you can't bury an M&M in the ground and grow an M&M tree, or the tone that Richard Dawkins uses with just about anybody who disagrees with him.
"It's a known, well-documented problem and a complete non-issue to anyone who's (shall we say) just a little it knowledgeable about computers. It'll collapse to "LINUX" without any problems whatsoever once you've downloaded two new packages and run a PERL script from the terminal window. Oh, but first, you need to check your controller version via an lspci -v, because under GNOME you might need to be running acjwrk as well. And…voila.
"That's insane."
"Oh, I suppose you'd rather use a Mac? And knuckle under to The Man with every keystroke? Some of us aren't ready to be implanted with RFID chips on our brainstems like a good little sheep just yet!"
Me, I'm very, very ready to be implanted. Hell, implant a Roy Scheider SeaQuest action figure above my left kneecap for no apparent reason whatsoever. I'll look real weird when I wear shorts and the inability to kneel and protect the bag during close plays at home will effectively end my career as catcher in the Cape Cod league, but if you promise to get the WiFi working on this thing, it'll be more than a fair trade as far as I'm concerned.
Linux works great as soon as everything's up and running, and I've done plenty of installs in which it went just as well a MacOS or Windows installation. It just depends on whether or not your distro is happy with your hardware. On this HP, the live CD wouldn't boot at all until I punched F6 during startup and added a little extra mojo to its boot prefs. Then I had to locate and install drivers to get the laptop's built-in video working properly, then I had to locate and install drivers to get the speakers working correctly…praise almighty Zarquon that Ethernet worked without a hitch, or else I'd be pretty well-stumped for solutions. If not for the fact that I had full access to Google on other machines, I wouldn't have even gotten past the startup problem.
It's a process. The good news is that nearly everything's handled by package managers that locate and download whatever you need, even user apps. Want a word processor? Here's a list of every word processor available everywhere. Click a checkbox, and a script that knows where to download it and how to get it up and running will do just that. But often, you need to type long sequences of terminal commands that you just barely understand, on the strength of a single poorly-worded post you found on a message board somewhere that was written by someone who . All to do something as advanced as getting the headphone jack working.
My Wi remains tragically un-Fied. I hit the limits of my current level of expertise and I felt that I had learned all that I was inclined to learn for the moment, so I moved on to my second Linux machine of the morning: a TiVO Series 3 box, on loan from the mothership for the next couple of months.
So much of what I write about is driven by what I'm up to, personally. I have come to slightly loathe the DVR that Verizon offers with their cable service. There's a cheerful 2 in 9 chance that it'll actually record what I've told it to record. It does dumbass things, too. I missed two weeks' worth of "Mythbusters" before I figured out that for some damned-fool reason, its program guide had begun to identify the show as "Myth Busters"; so the original series order was no longer any good.
"The dumbass things that this thing routinely does" is a long list, and colorful enough to make Paris Hilton feel a little better about her own life choices.
I won't go into detail. Instead, I'll mention that after years of using a TiVO Series 1, using this thing's programming features is like switching from a Mac to a TRS-80. It's dumb, dumb, dumb, ruined not by a lack of extreme sophistication but by a lack of just simple attention to detail. It's so tough to search for shows that I avoid its interface entirely and simply use TitanTV.com to find what I want, and set up all of the week's recordings manually.
This box alphabetizes "The Daily Show" and all shows like it under the letter "T."
The prosecution rests, Your Honor.
So it seemed like a great excuse to write my first TiVO column in a couple of years. I ordered a CableCard from Verizon (it's a little slide-in thingy that lets third-party hardware unscramble cable channels), slid it into the Series 3…and learned about the 161-4 Error Code.
Here's the proper English usage on that. Your boss corners you in the breakroom and demands to know just why the hell the quarterly budget is three weeks overdue and threatens to put the entire company in default to two different state and federal regulating agencies. You nod, and reply "161-4."
Your boss will blink once or twice, pause, and then walk away. Because "161-4" is the universal language for "I have no information to offer you, except that it's totally not my fault and you should probably ask somebody else what the problem is."
I called Verizon (I was going to have to call them anyway, to activate the card) and they were of no help…but only because they were suffering from a massive corporate network failure that was affecting operations in all 48 states. I mean, dude: the guy's cat just died. Metaphorically. I couldn't give him a hard time at a time like that. He definitely had that sort of watery tone in his voice that communicated that he'd been at the pointy end of the Wrath of God all morning. Clearly, the most humanitarian response I could offer would be to acknowledge that if there a big button on his keyboard marked "Make Network Go Now" he most likely would have pushed it already.
"I hope your day gets better soon," I said. He then spent so much time assuring me that his morning hadn't been all that bad, really, that it clearly communicated that he was just three more angry phone calls away from wishing he were dead.
In an earlier and less-enlightened time, he would instead have been wishing to end all human life on this planet, except for himself and various important service industries. And for the purposes of this fantasy, hot Brazilian cheerleaders would be defined as a service industry.
Oh, and apparently the computers on the International Space Station have all shut down, endangering the lives of several astronauts and threatening to turn an important progressive step in Mankind's new life among the stars into, ironically, an orbiting tomb instead. Which in many ways is just as big a hassle for them as the lack of WiFi on my fourth or fifth office computer and my inability to get an $800 video recorder working are for me.
I think I wouldn't be completely out of line to point out that they're only dealing with one balky computer system and not two. Plus, their tech support is way, way better than what I have access to.
All the same, I don't want my greater overall hardship to distract from the point: things are tough all over. And the tech is really starting to get pissy about things, for reasons we probably won't undestand until the Master Control Program chooses to gloat a little before exterminating us all.
I can't get Cover Flow working on this thing...
Friday, June 22, 2007 • 11:31:25 AM EDT
Santa Larry, my FedEx driver, pulled up to the house carrying a festively-wrapped gift. Which is hardly an uncommon occurrence, although when he shows up before 10:30 AM it usually means he's delivering something special. Whoever sent it sprang for guaranteed morning delivery.
We exchanged our efficient and well-practiced (but sincere) greetings as I swapped one signature for one package. As I turned to re-enter IhnatCorp World HQ, I saw something that made me freeze on the spot:
The package was from Apple.
I wasn't expecting a package from Apple. But they usually choose AM delivery when they send…cool hardware.
It was a FedEx Box. Perfect size for an iPhone.
I bounced the box on my fingertips experimentally. It was the perfect weight for an iPhone.
I closed my eyes, said a silent prayer to Bongo the Most Glory plus the Great Pumpkin as a backup deity for good measure. I purged all negativity from my heart, commanded myself to become a perfect vessel for the Universe's collective purpose, and then I pulled the zipthing on the top of the box like Charlie Bucket opening his Wonkabar.
(Ideally the second one, not the one he got for his birthday.)
Rather than peering inside the box, I chose to just tip it and allow its contents to slide into my hand.
I looked down.
It was not an iPhone.
It was a copy of Aperture.
Which is a fantastic product. But it's not an iPhone.
I'm not angry or disappointed, you understand. But if the first line of my Aperture 1.5 review reads "Why the holy #&@% isn't this an iPhone?!?" you'll know why.
Oh, I'll just do a few Hail Marys or something later.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 • 06:37:29 PM EDT
I stink.
(Why yes…quite literally. It's deep in the Nineties here in Boston and my little desk fan is doing its best but it's up against the entire output of a fusion reactor that's the size of the sun. It hardly seems a fair fight. But actually I wasn't talking about my goat-like scent.)
I am indeed a heart-stoppingly powerful and feared industry pundit, but as astonishing as this may sound, my name is still substantially less well-known than Buddy Holly's. So oftentimes I'll be wading through my email and find an invitation from some tech company or another inviting me to participate in a focus group.
Ha ha ha ha ha. This is like when the Joker kidnaps all of Gotham's wealthiest socialites for ransom, nigh comprehending that his meticulously-laid plans to keep Batman completely in the dark ended the moment his henchmen threw a sack over Bruce Wayne and then threw the sack into a purple-and-yellow Chevy van.
If it's an interesting company — and I know they have some Interesting Top-Secret Plans afoot — I'll say yes…provided that I'm not doing anything unethical. The "No Harm Done" rule is in effect. In a nutshell, so long as I don't have to lie and I don't cause anybody to get burned, it's all good.
The first part of that can often turn the pre-screening into a modern version of "What's My Line?"
"What do you do for a living, Mr. Ihnatko?"
"I'm self-employed." (ten dollars.)
"Could you describe what sort of work that entails?"
"I'm a writer." (twenty dollars.)
"Do you write fiction?"
("One moment please," the host interjects, and we have a whispering conversation off-mic.)
"While it's true that our mystery guest does write fiction, I think I'm correct in saying that professionally, he is primarily associated with nonfiction. That's thirty dollars, and over to you, Oscar Levant."
If the inquisitor runs out patience or questions before asking "Are you a member of the press?" I win. Of course, we're talking about a shot at a table of refreshments at best, but if I have my backpack with me I can quickly make the hour I spend at an anonymous industrial park into a highly revenue-positive experience.
But this time there was a v.positive motivation to participate: it was a popular monthly service with both an online and a postal component, and they were willing to compensate me for my time by waiving my subscription fees for six months. I was already very totally in; the white squiggle of frosting on the Hostess Cupcake was the fact that the group was taking place in Framingham, at what I knew was a nexus between three fairly decent diners.
(I'm testing out the new Google Custom Maps feature by building a map of all of the diners I've eaten at and photographed. One diner would be a new hit, one would be a "pickup" (I'd eaten there a couple of years ago but couldn't find a picture), a third would be a do-over.)
So I had a bowl of Breakfast Chili at Diner #1 and drove a quarter mile to the focus group. I was handed a clipboard with the usual nondisclosure agreement to sign: I'm not allowed to talk about anything I see or hear during the hour.
Ah. A possible dealbreaker: if the NDA precludes me from speaking about any of this proposed new stuff until it's actually released, that could be bad for business. And if the New Stuff was what I think it is, I'm guessing that I already know way more about what they've got planned than anybody in the building.
"The nondisclosure only applies to information I learn here, right?" I asked.
Not a red-alert look on the face of the checkin person, but it was a strong yellow.
"You can't discuss anything you hear about today."
"Yes, but what I mean is that if today I learn that [company name redacted] will be selling helicopters-by-download, and next week I read about it in USA Today, that doesn't mean that I can't talk to people about this Helicopter idea if I only stick to the publicly-available info in the newspaper article, right?"
(Accessing…Accessing…)
"Yyyyyes."
I signed. It was a win-win. All of my existing sources could remain intact, and even if I couldn't write anything based on what I learned today, I could use that information to ask some shockingly good questions of my own people later on and thus put that information back into play outside of the NDA.
It's distressingly like what happens in that cop movie where the Bad Cop beats information out of some random thug and then finds a way to get a "second" copy of that information in a way that'll be admissible in court. But the system works. See? Not a single crack dealer or meth lab anywhere near my office.
I cooled my heels in the reception area for ten minutes or so with ten other Representative Samples Of America, clearly united by our desire to steer the future direction of this great ship as well by our lack of anything to keep us from being here in the middle of a workday.
Soon, the clipboard lady called the class to attention.
"Has everybody signed in?"
Nods all around.
"All right. Well, we've already collected the survey sample we needed this morning, so you're all free to go. You will still be receiving six months' free service, at your current service plan, as our thank you for coming out here. Your attendance will be entered in the system tomorrow."
This got my attention. What an odd thing to say.
Nonetheless, I felt a sensation radiating just below my breastbone. It was the familiar Pull of the Weasel.
"Wait," I asked. "You're saying that the company's computers will be informed of this 'six months of free service at our current service plan' thing tomorrow?"
"That's right."
"So…"
(Accessing…accessing…)
"…So if I'm on the $15 three-per-month plan right now, but as soon as I get home today I upgrade myself to the $45 8-per plan, I'll get six months' worth of the $45 plan because that's what my plan will be tomorrow when you apply the mojo?"
She made sure she said precisely what she was supposed to say and nothing more.
"I asked [company name redacted] how to answer this specific question. I've been told to tell you that you will be given six months of free service at your existing rate plan, and that [cnr]'s computers will not be informed of this billing change until tomorrow."
Thia seemed like a very significant piece of information.
As soon as I got home, I logged into my account and re-familiarized myself with the Billing Options page. The service is helpful enough to maintain a list of everything it ever charges to your credit card. So if I did sign up for the most expensive service and I got charged for it, it would take me just a moment to figure it out.
I liked the odds. I upgraded. "Would you like this service change to take effect immediately?" the site asked. "For just $9.39, we can send you your next five [redacted]s on June 27. Otherwise, the change will apply at the start of your next billing cycle on July 5."
I smirked. "Ten bucks for just a few days of extra service?" I sneered. "Pull the other one!" And so I clicked the "No" button.
I have a little mantra that keeps me centered.
It goes something like this:
"I'm not a smart man," I say. "In fact, I am the dumbest kind of person: I am a dumb person who thinks he's a smart person."
I keep saying it as needed, but I never seem to learn from it.
The service page believed that I was signed up for the top-whack subscription. So in theory the Freebie Mojo would probably give me the $45 deal. But if it was selected but not actually active tomorrow…?
I clicked back. Somehow, I no longer had the ability to say "No, please, for the love of God, charge me the nine bucks and let's crank that up straight way."
I would have to phone customer service. I soon found myself talking to a very nice representative and fibbing a shameful deal.
"I do have one solution," he said. "It looks like the only way I can do this is if I cancel your current account and then give you a new one."
(Accessing…accessing…)
"Er…thanks, but are you sure there's no way to avoid that? I don't want to lose all of my Friends and Recommendations."
"Oh, no worries there, sir…I can transfer them all to your new account."
"Ah."
"Would you like me to do that for you now, sir?"
"Nnnnnnno."
"You'd like to just wait until the next billing cycle?"
"….Welllll, you see I've got lots of friends coming over for the Fourth of July. That's why I want to make sure this new plan comes into effect immediately. So that I can have eight [redacteds] here for them and their kids when they come by."
"Oh! I see. Well, then you'll definitely want me to transfer your account, then."
(Accessing….)
(Abort/Retry/Fail)
"Okay, I'll level with you. I was on this focus group and they're giving me six months of free service that starts tomorrow and I really want the free period to be absolutely the most gloriously expensive six months of service I've ever had. If the Christ Child is born in my manger, I want Mary and Joseph to swaddle the Messiah in nothing but [redacted]s. You know?"
"One moment, sir."
Oh boy.
"All right…actually, I don't know why, but the system is now letting me change your plan on your existing account. You'll be billed the nine dollars and your next five [redacted]s will ship tomorrow."
I was raised Catholic and I swear, my memories of this aspect of my upbringing are only positive ones. But I felt the need to ask the customer-service guy for his forgiveness for fibbing to him. I have no idea where the hell that came from.
So let's see what happens. I got a confirmation email and everything, so I have every reason to believe that the guy hasn't dropped me to the $5 plan out of spite.
Still and all: I suck.
But at least I'll suck while surrounded by some of the finest [redacted]s ever made from all around the world.
Good...REAL Good.
Thursday, June 28, 2007 • 09:58:53 AM EDT
The Fourth of July is just a nine-iron away, which means that you can tune into nearly any morning show and witness a beloved American Independence Day tradition.
"…by the serious danger involved with these so-called 'harmless' fireworks. Particularly when they're being used by kids, as opposed to experienced pyrotechnics engineers such as Earl and me."
"Kevin, I understand that you've set up some demonstrations of just how destructive illegal fireworks can be."
"Indeed we have. We're going to start off with probably the most innocuous firework of them all: the simple sparkler. We've put one in the shirt pocket of this child mannequin. Just watch what happens when we light it. Here we go:"
"Kevin, I notice that it's throwing off sparks all over the child's shirt."
"That's right, Barbara. It's a cotton shirt, little different from any garment that you might find in your child's closet on a summer day such as this."
"And the sparks, they're mostly landing right on it."
"That's right, Barbara."
"…84 degrees here in the metro area."
…
"If you're headed in to work late this morning, be sure to steer clear of I-93 and the Weston connector; a tractor-trailer has jacknifed in the Northbound lane, spilling office supplies all over the left two lanes."
…
"Tomorrow, we'll have 'America's Next Top Model' here in the studio, talking about her lifelong battle with psoriasis…ah!"
"That's right, Barbara…as you can see, the pocket of this child's shirt is now on fire, there at the top."
"Wow, all that flame from just a sparkler!"
"Next, we have what in the fireworks underground is called a 'cherry bomb.' In fact, this very explosive is often depicted as a toy in such popular animated cartoons as 'The Bart Simpson Show.' But just watch what happens to the fingers of the mannequin after we light this."
(pkrak!)
"I guess this kid won't be playing any more Nintendo with that hand."
"I should say not, Barbara. We've also placed one inside the mannequin's open mouth."
(p-krph!)
"A shocking display, Kevin."
"Yeah, I wrapped that one in a condom filled with Heinz ketchup. Okay, let's move on to the M-80. The kids regard this as nothing more than a big firecracker, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a high-velocity explosive. We've placed one underneath a watermelon that weighs more than ten pounds."
(b-towww!)
"There's just nothing left of it, Kevin."
"That's right, Barbara. And the pieces have been thrown quite some distance. By way of bringing the point home about just how much energy is released by one of these fireworks and how they're certainly not playthings and these kids should have nothing but respect for their destructive potential, we've placed six of these M-80's at the bottom of a five-foot length of 6" steel pipe. Earlier today, I coated this Elmo doll with lard and I am now using a broom handle to jam the doll all the way down into the barre…er, the pipe, until it's wedged just above the explosives."
"The little crash helmet is adorable, Kevin."
(t-CHUFFF!)
"For all the good that will do him, Barbara. I think by the Fourth, he's just going to be re-entering Earth's atmosphere."
"Kevin, we have to go to a commercial soon, but I understand you have one more safety demonstration to give us before you go?"
"That's right, Barbara. Very quickly, as its popular name implies, the 'quarter stick' has the same explosive kick as one quarter of a stick of TNT. Eight of them, such as the amount that a child might use all at once if he feared that his mom was about to check on him and that it was now or never, deliver a tremendous destructive punch. It can't be dampened, not even when you place them at the bottom of a bathtub filled with chocolate pudding. Oh, I should mention that this one is sponsored by Red Bull Energy Drink…"
Fire marshals deliver an important message before this holiday weekend, a message which the kids of America must be made to understand: explosives look really, really cool, especially if you're standing close enough to get some really good video of them they go off.
Except without the house and the cars and the money.
Thursday, June 28, 2007 • 12:13:55 PM EDT
Oy. I'm living like P. Diddy this week. When my phone rings there's at least a 1 in 4 chance that it's someone who wants me to come into some studio and talk about the iPhone. So despite this 90-degree heat, it's important that I keep fresh, camera-ready clothes handy.
The lastest call was five minutes ago. Usually it's either a quick five-minute live shot or a ten-minute interview in front of an Apple store, with the knowledge that they'll just be cutting selected bits of it into a larger package later on. This time, a major guest for an afternoon call-in show cancelled at last-minute, resulting in the frazzled question "Do we know anybody nearby who has no kids and no real job?" Result: I'll be on NECN for a whole hour from 4 PM onward. So if you live in New England, tune in at around 3:32 because that's when I'll likely have to launch into my a capella rendition of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" to fill the time.
Dammit…it's supposed to be 95 degrees this afternoon but I'm going to have to wear a jacket for this, I think…
And yet, Leno never calls me.
Thursday, June 28, 2007 • 08:12:04 PM EDT
Well! I was quite the little media whore today, wasn't I?
The show on NECN went really well. When you're in a news studio, you're a guest in somebody else's house which means that you have to pick up your rules of behavior from your hosts. These guys were v.nice and it soon became clear that I didn't have to be dull. What happens is that at the beginning, I quietly test the electrical fence just like the T. Rexes in the first "Jurassic Park" and if I don't see that flash of medium panic in the hosts' eyes, I know that I can free up that part of the CPU I usually devote to second-guessing what I say before I actually say it.
That said, when a caller asked about using the YouTube widget to watch gay porn and was dumped before he finished the question, I did have a quip loaded up and moved my finger off the trigger guard, but thought better of it when I noted that the temperature of the room had dropped ten degrees.
I had my MacBook there out of sight just in case someone asked me sumptin' tech-mo-lo-no-logical and I had neither the information nor the skill to lie convincingly. But in truth all I used it for was to post to my Twitter once or twice during the breaks.
Why?
Well, because I could. It was the casebook use of Twitter. "Hi! I am thrilled to report that I am able to report something under this particular situation."
I was already showing a little leg this morning, thanks to a nice little cameo in this morning's PVPOnline strip. The nicest bit about this sort of thing is that I've been hearing from friends all day long.
I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. I truly am The Cartoonists' Friend. Well, yes, many cardcarriers in the Close Personal Friends Of Andy Ihnatko organization are cartoonists, but when you take pen or stylus in hand and attempt to break down my visual user interface in a way that the common man will readily identifgy, I'm hardly a stumper. David Pogue — for all of his positive points, which cannot be counted, as unto the stars — defies this process.
But me? Come, come. Hat, sideburns, husky but not shockingly-large frame…you've got it. I'm only marginally tougher to characature than Groucho Marx and if you try and fail, perhaps cartooning isn't the right line of work for you.
Before I leave you this fine (wretched) summer day, let me say what you're all no doubt thinking after reading that strip. The others in line were quietly Twittering and Flickering the line-jumper in impotent indignation. Clearly, it was me who administered the Old Testament-style beatdown on Brent.
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