Every day I become more convinced that Mr. Hand, played by Ray Walston in the seminal movie , was correct in believing that everyone is on dope.
No? You beg to differ? Not so fast – I’m talking to you Little Miss Patchouli Legalize-It. But I’m also calling you out, Mr. Cialis Q. Flomax. It’s all dope, and Mr. Hand was right:
You people are all high.
Either that, or…..
The latest big viral sensation on these internet tubes is already being touted as “the worst campaign ad ever.” It was produced by the campaign of one , Republican primary candidate Senator from California (and Protector of the Tubes).
Carly Fiorina used to run , and her tenure at HP featured such exciting developments as:
breaking up one largely functional company into many individualized fiefdoms run by her legion of demon-sheep-fighting monkeys
acquiring just before Compaq went completely under
a series of leaks to the press, illegally-taped phone calls and meetings, and unlawful disclosure of personnel information in an attempt to discredit members of the HP
So you can see why she would make a great Senator from California.
Last week, her campaign unleashed a tour-de-force of a ad:
The video is ’s “” du jour, kids are making and remixes, and merchandise featuring the “Demon Sheep” is available for sale.
Whoa whoa whoa…wait a minute. Demon Sheep merchandise? Stuff based on a political ad released just last week has manufactured and is available for sale this Monday morning?
Carly Fiorona now beats Carly Simon in a GoogleFight (www.googlefight.com)?
Interesting. You might even call it intriguing. It sounds to me like Fiorina has finally gotten the hang of this internet marketing crap.
By creating an attack ad that looks like it was filmed by high-school art students drunk on Everclear and Kool-Aid, and sporting a script that could have been written during a bad acid trip, her campaign has tapped into the public’s unquenchable for cheap, pointless entertainment.
Their flavor of the day, renowned douchebag Glenn Beck, is running a “documentary” right now about the horrors of communism and socialism and any other form of government in general. He just said there are only two regimes in the world today – Cuba and .
I guess I was watching football on TV the day that China became a democracy.
When did the rabid right-wingers become so viciously anti-government? They’re not really libertarians, not quite, they just seem to hate authority of any kind (other than their own corporate overlords from Australia). I’m no fan of the man, but I think must have gotten sent to the principal’s office one too many times as a kid. He’s like a modern Napoleon Bonaparte, running his tiny empire and trying to drag us all to Hell with him.
Maybe the Murdoch-ian media empire’s contempt for authority was borne out of his early, failed defense of a child-murderer:
A defining moment in Murdoch’s life was the Stuart case in Adelaide when The News began a campaign to free Max Stuart, a young Aboriginal carnival worker, who had been convicted of the murder of a small girl on a beach near Ceduna, South Australia in late 1958. Stuart had been sentenced to death by hanging. The News was openly critical of the case and investigated it extensively. The was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
The campaign by The News raised the ire of the , . He established a royal commission, conducted by the state’s Chief Justice, the same judge who had passed sentence on Stuart. The outcome was a confirmation of Stuart’s guilt and a recommendation that (of which Murdoch was managing director) and its editor be charged with nine counts of seditious libel, a form of treason based on medieval , and criminal libel.
Wow – an Australian web site with information like this. I guess those slimy tentacles only reach so far.
Maybe Murdoch is just bitter about his China dreams not so much working out:
FOR more than 10 years, China’s potential mesmerised Rupert Murdoch. He poured more than $2 billion into the country and lost at least half of it. He spent lavishly courting the communist mandarins, and cut ethical corners. He even took a young Chinese wife, who bore him two daughters and installed a Mandarin-speaking nanny so they would grow up bicultural.
And where did it all get him? Not far, according to Bruce Dover, who served the Murdoch empire in Asia as director of business development when China was Murdoch’s big global play. “He was literally on the telephone every other day seeking news of progress,” Dover writes in his book, Rupert’s Adventures In China, to be published next week.
Murdoch described Wendi Deng, his third and much younger Chinese wife, as his “great help and adviser”, but Dover was unconvinced. He writes: “The degree to which she has been a great help is arguable. While she brought to the partnership an insight into the cultural and often complex nuances of doing business there, she had no head for the politics of the country’s opaque and evolving political structure. She had no business connections in China. She teamed up with the new stepson [James Murdoch] to initiate and advocate Chinese internet investments nearly all of which were later written off as total losses.”
Oh snap, another Australian media outlet busting on Rupert M. That has to sting. Well, at least this time he lost to that liberty of freedom, the People’s , rather than to a court that convicted a child-killer.
I’ve been listening to all this talk of “The Cloud”, which to me is the new Web 2.0, which replaced the , which used to be the new black. And I think it’s interesting, while also being a load of crap.
Users are encouraged to think they can rely on the cloud to offload their machines’ data processing needs, to backup their valuable data, and to share information. Used properly, the cloud can probably play a partial role in these and other laudable goals. But just ask any user of the Sidekick smartphone how they felt when either or T-Mobile or some invisible gnomes managed to fuck up one of the most basic server upgrades and lose all of their data…oh and render their devices largely inoperable for a couple days (the advisory at the time was that Sidekick owners not turn their devices off, as whatever little of their precious data was still stored on the client phones would be deleted when the phones restarted and reattached to the cloud). Many users numbly and obediently left their Sidekicks on in the vain and desperate hope that the powers that be (or the invisible gnomes) would be able to restore the cloud data…until their batteries ran down and buh-bye last desperate hope.
I’m sure these victims enjoyed their gift certificates to buy more smartphone services from the parties involved. If anything like that happens to Blackberry users, their will be geektards armed with pitchforks and torches in the streets of every metropolis in the U.S.
The cloud can fail. Hardware can fail. Software can and regularly does fail. These machines are just hunks of interconnected microprocessors pushing around a bunch of one’s and zero’s. And as usual the most common source of problems is, as HAL 9000 put it in 2001:A Space Odyssey, “human error.”
The Sidekick failure? Human screwup. Most cases of identity theft? Not malicious hackers, but often an employee leaving a laptop with sensitive data about customers or clients on it unsecured in public. Humans are the weakest link more often than people realize.
And the internet can be a very strong link. To understand that this is not just a misanthropic point of view, let me give you a bit of history in the form of a quiz.
Are “The Internet” and “The ” the same thing?
Too many people with computers say yes. The internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet, as everyone who has been on youtube in the last few years knows, is a series of tubes. The tubes are connected together, kind of like the old version of “telephones” you made when you were young with two tin cans and a long measure of string.
The web, of course, is a layer on top of . It’s like frosting on a cake, except most of the frosting in this case is kind of hard, and discolored, but it’s plenty sugary. It’s a graphical layer on top of the tubes, and of course so many people like picture books and whatnot. No wonder it caught on.
The internet was invented by DARPA (a government agency) to provide a highly-redundant communications method in the invent of a Russian nuclear attack that disabled phones and the like (think days, or when Reagan was president and the Russkies nuking us or us nuking them seemed like the big threat we faced).
The internet holds up very well under stress. The Web doesn’t. On 9/11, the internet backbones (for the most part) stayed up. A lot of telecom companies had hubs in or around the , which caused some spotty outages, but overall the highly-redundant system of networked computers that makes up the internet held up.
The web, on the other hand, did not. Web like CNN, all the other news sites, Drudge (I assume – I don’t go to Drudge even under the worst of circumstances) were crushed under the load. The Web can be worse for a person than TV. No matter how many people tune into a TV station, the signal strength and availability are unaltered. But if a web site gets a massive spike in traffic, it can go down. And God forbid we can’t get to our precious account, or login to Facebook, or surf for more porn.
And really, isn’t that what too much of the Web has become? There’s Too Much Information out there. Most of it is porn, online scams, or fear-mongering, sensationalism and distortions. Oh and spyware, I forgot spyware, much of which is so badly written it doesn’t end up doing anything malicious other than making your homepage something weird like www.hickoryfarms.com and slowing your computer down. Don’t get me wrong, scanning and prevention is important, and there are botnets out there harvesting thousands of computers, but in the end most of the applets like this are poorly-written pieces of crap.
So do yourself a favor or two. Get off the damned cloud and the social networking and the online gaming and whatever other “addictive” crap you’re spending too much time on. Fire up a full scan and then a full malware scan. While that’s running, watch TV for a bit. Flip between MSNBC, CNN, and . Then think on what you’ve seen and find a way to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The equivalent of one month worth of your internet access costs would go a long way there.
You want to make money online? Easy. Just watch what people are doing offline. Right now, are being shown on starring and .
For those nerds among us, you know the ones who live in their parents’ basement and spend more time talking to people they’ve never met on the internet than interacting with real , a bit of background.
The “ShamWow Guy” is an infomercial celebrity who did a few infomercials I really enjoyed. One of my favorite lines of his is “We can’t do this all day, folks.” Another favorite line is “You’re gonna love my nuts.” He has a fairly heavy -ish accent and spiky hair.
In his Infomercial Life, he has whored for products like the ShamWow! and the SlapChop!
In his off-TV life, he was arrested for allegedly smacking up a prostitute.
Yet his infomercials still run.
And Billy Mays is one the Kings of , with his ALWAYS YELLING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS.
In his Infomercial Life, he hawked a ton of products and his hair was perfect.
In off-TV life, he died of a while flying on an airplane. And was found to have some coke in his system.
And yet his infomercials still run. It’s kind of spooky actually, this zombie-Billy Mays telling me to buy his stuff…from beyond the grave…
But here lies poor , victim of his own dick, losing sponsors by the handful. And dancing on his endorsement grave are “Vince Offer” (you’re gonna love his nuts!) and Billy Mays’ bloated corpse. Their families must be laughing all the way to the bank.
Study on that for a few minutes if you really want to understand marketing. I don’t, I think it’s the devil’s work, but what do I know? I’m just some nerd living in my mom’s basement talking with people I’ve never met in “real life”. What’s so real about it, any way?
Analytics is a fancy word for stats, really – probably invented by the same guy who coined that catchy “” term.
And analytics can really alter your world view; more than LSD or drinking rubbing . It’s kind of like that time you walked in on your parents doing it. For some, it’s best to close the door and walk away.
But in my ongoing efforts to better understand the , I’ve been looking at analytics, metrics, statistics, and some other things my dad always calls “ten-dollar words” – and some of it isn’t pretty.
You people are obviously surfing the web while at work a lot of the time. The external traffic across my network blew chunks over the HannuChristmaWanzaaFestivus holidays, and today (first day back at work for many of you internet pervs) it’s skyrocketing. WTF? I know the unemployment rate in the States is around 10 or 11 %, but don’t you people have jobs?
You people watch way too much and are putting way too much effort into it. Think I’m a liar and a whore? You may be right, but will really change your opinion of humanity. Just watch it over the course of a day. You know, come on ya puss, you don’t have anything better to do like, oh I don’t know, your job.
Okay try this little experiment if you think I’m wrong. Each night, around “primetime”, flip through the channel and note the movies that are showing. Then look at Google Trends. I guarantee you at least one of the movies (and maybe two or three if you’re “lucky”) will be in the top Google Trends for searches. Last night it was “” – WTF?!? Seriously, what do you need to know about that film. It’s a movie about a dog named Old Yeller, the boy has to shoot him, and you cry at the end. End of story. Not the cure for cancer, just a sappy, maudlin film made to manipulate the masses.
A couple years ago, Wikipedia released their list of top search phrases for the year. In the top 10 were “Google” and “Wikipedia”. Think on that for a minute.
There is an obsession with celebrities, sports, and “controversy” in our culture. This morning I saw two Olympic athletes hawking their “” on CNN on behalf of Nestle Crunch. First, whoever made viral a tech-related verb should be shot. I’m tired of marketing people turning words into verbs – the day that I heard “task force” used as a verb, a little piece of me died. Second, it’s bullshit – they are Olympic athletes who I thought were supposed to be amateurs, and they were on CNN, which I thought was a news network. But there they were, hawking Nestle Crunch while looking like NASCAR drivers in their shiny Nestle Crunch polo shirts, with a Nestle Crunch bar that was larger than ’s oversized-head in front of them, and a logo on top of their “viral video” that said “Sponsored by Nestle”. Between all that and CNN’s crawlers across the bottom I got vertigo. But damn those videos sure are great! She dun did a backflippy right in front of the funny-named guy’s bobsled…hot damn, Ma, this is almost as good as when Junior done won that race….boogety boogety boogety!
And now I’m off to go link some viral videos to some Web 2.0 properties in an effort to synergize their monetization.
In the immortal words of Dilbert, “Welcome to Marketing. Two Drink Minimum.”
Sorry folks, despite all the requests I don’t do . I’m a guy. Always have been, always will be. I’m a simple man with simple tastes. I could upgrade this workstation to have more , but I’d rather spend a couple hours fucking settings than unplug everything, the case, figure out which other computer to steal…I mean cannibalize…memory from, pop it out, then begin to worry that the RAM from the victim computer might not be compatible with the in the victorious computer…, why not just hook the two of them up on a WAN and let the two POS boxes battle it out…one must fall….
One Must Fall:2097 was a cool game back in the day. Ran on any old piece of shit computer, and you could battle with your own giant robot. Now here we are in 2010 and not only do we NOT have giant robots that we can make fight each other, we don’t have the damned flying cars. Or the robot maid. And you nerds know what I’m talking about – that’s right, the Robot French Maid. All we have are these pieces of junk, faster than ever, hunks of bolts and screws and nuts that we work for. That’s right, I think we’re working for the rather than the computers doing the work for us.
Sorry I’m just in a foul mood. Woke up this morning to a few giant, steaming piles of animal puke (the canine is the suspect based on the volume, each pile was about the size of a feline, so they’ve been ruled out). At some point I’ll get around to steam-cleaning the carpet – which of course involves using some damned hardware…or maybe I should get around to that memory upgrade on this piece of HW…
Gotta go google more windows tweaks for the hunk of machine…
