Good Bad and Ugly of iOS7

The Good

ios-7

I’m sure I’ll grow to love the iO/S improvements, just as I’m sure that many of them were probably available long ago on some small fractured percent of properly updated Android phones. For that matter, I don’t doubt that simply jail-breaking a current iPhone allows for some of the features in the upcoming official iOS7 release.

I’m too lazy to jailbreak my iDevice, so you know I’m too lazy to fool with learning any new O/S, let alone the jumbled mix of Android “flavors”.  No disrespect to those who do, since I could have done so myself under different conditions.  I could easily  have been one of “you”.

There was a time in my life where I wanted to tinker “under the hood” of every electrical or mechanical device I owned. That time is long past. Now I just want my gear to work when I turn it on, and I want it to engage and function without me having to remember a list of coded steps akin to the Up,Up,Down,Left,A,B,X cheat codes of yore.

The Bad

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I may grow fond of having my iPhone look like cross between a 90′s MySpace page and a “My Sparkle Pony” commercial, but I can’t be the only person who likes skeuomorphs and wish they were an option.  I want my phone icon to look like it is still mounted to the wall at the Shady Rest Hotel in Hooterville.  I want my mail icon to resemble one of those pneumatic tubes like they use to shuffle mail around in the old days.  Give me a flashlight icon that mimics a coal miners lantern ferchrissakes!

The Ugly

maxwellsmart

Your preferences on icons may not reflect my steam-punk sensibilities, but isn’t that suppose to be a part of the “big win” of all this new technology?  Isn’t it a bit unnecessarily Orwellian to lock us all down on the same icons or is there some National Security letter somewhere forcing Apple to unify the look of the device the NSA most covets to spy on us?  I dunno, and Siri and Google seem particularly jumbled in their responses.  If any of you happens to see a distressed twenty something American wandering about Hong Kong, maybe you could ask him and give the rest of us an update.

Enjoy.

A Bullet Dodged

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Whew. With the election finally behind me, I can start to breath a little easier now. Had Romney managed to beg, borrow or steal the thing, my time as a free soldier of army of truth would have been in serious jeopardy. There is no doubt in my mind that my name would have raced to the top of the list of American citizens targeted for drone attacks because of suspected terrorist activity. How’s that you ask?

I was copy and pasting JZ lyrics and placing them where they would most likely be seen by my old racist neighbors back in Mississippi, as well as Tea Party Patriots everywhere!

Those people would have put their hand on a Bible (Even the Mormon one!) and honestly sworn an oath to the almighty that what I was doing by posting those lyrics was terrorizing them in far worse ways than anything Osama Bin Laden ever imagined.

Good thing for me that JZ won the election!

Enjoy.

To the Top

Keep Movin’ up, don’t you ever stop! 

Whatever it is, take it to the top! You can do what you want to, In your heart it will come true! If you reach for the stars you can go that far! Stop hesitating and anticipating!

To the Top, that’s you mark. Get Ready. Set, Go!!

Can I get a big DAR-WIN! ?

Today’s prosperity gospel provided by a proud member of the American rationalist community (and jubilant Democrats all across the nation!) with, as the Beatles encouraged, a little help from my “friends“!  Links provided below for both Red and Blue state residents so they can all play that funky music.

Spotify link, for the discerning class of people who are successful (and socially responsible) enough to pony up ten bucks a month for the ultimate groove machine AND continue subsidizing those impoverished citizens still living in “the breakaway states” of the country, (aka, parts of USA where sex with goats carries less of a social stigma than homosexuality.)

Youtube link provided for the hoi polloi

Enjoy.

Sucker Bets

Today’s blog entry inspired by the following video from Ricard Wiseman

Judging by the Youtube comments on this video, not everybody is “in” on the joke.  This has me pondering the political implications of applying the “special forces” that Richard is displaying here to work in the field of presidential polling. Googling….

Turns out that application of Richard Wiseman’s magic new technology is already patented for politics by some dude named Nate Silver.  Dam you Nate Silver, you and your fancy devil-inspired numerology.  The American populace was TOTALLY IN THE DARK over Nate’s reliance on ARABIC numbers!  Holy shit people.  And you were worried about a mosque at Ground Zero?  I’ve actually heard rumors that this Nate Silver is suspiciously effeminate and if that doesn’t scare you out of your complacent fog of universal non-comformity then there is no hope for any of you.  Noting such complacence has me considering calling the Saint Bernards off their search for survivors in the recent avalanche on Bullshit Mountain.  Free round of smelling salts to all my wing-nut friends!!

I just found the next-best-thing to the “sure thing”  sucker bet to replace the one Richard is teaching me. ruining for me.

I am predicting the Petraeus affair will make it’s way beyond SNL and into cartoon or sitcom form before my birthday on the 24th of Nov.

Two and a Half Men is gasping for new material like Charlie Sheen snorting up coke at a hooker party, so that’s my sitcom pick.  Bart Simpson’s blackboard seems a likely choice for first animated take-down. Leave your guesses in the comments if you want to play along.   Let me know if  there are any Petraeus joke sightings I have missed.

In return I toss you this brief tidbit.  Funniest one yet, and comes directly off “non comedy” nightly news in Colorado.  They “snatched” the wrong book cover photo off Google for their nightly news.

The REAL sucker bet is getting an internet newb to bet against there already being 10,000 tweets linking this Colorado graphic “mishap” with the recently passed marijuana legislation there.  Talk about low hanging fruit!!

Enjoy.

Election Roundup 2012

I have a Facebook and Twitter feed to prove I was up REAL late here in Germany, watching the election and putting my bony fingers of contention to good use. In fact, the night of the election my fingertips were bouncing off my keyboard faster and harder than a midget cowboy riding a Dutch hooker.   For the record, I am only willing to shell out for food for the hungry, universal healthcare for the masses and a nickel more for a pizza so the delivery guy can afford $4 gas AND a dentist.  If any of you oversexed Democrats high on legalized hippy lettuce wants to see that rodeo in Amsterdam, you’ll have to pony up for your own ticket.  I promise you’ll get a far more graphic demonstration of the metaphors applied in the aforementioned simile.

Election Tweets

I have some Tweets from the evening that are more precious to me than my kids.  I’ll pull more screen shots out later and mix them in with my old vacation photos, either on a future blog post, or over at my house when we’re finished with sanctifying Christmas by stuffing our faces with cranberry sauce, before the start of the sacred NFL Xmas game extravaganza.   Just in case you think my football analogy as sui generis:

It’s times like these that are made to reminisce on things that happened back in the “good old days”.  If you can’t wait to see my full set of tweets, they are out there in the wild, but take caution.  Think of my tweets as “highly concentrated snark”.  Reading a couple of them is equivalent to chugging two large Red Bulls.  Do not read them while driving or operating heavy machinery.

The Setup

Things weren’t looking good for Romney even before the sun came up on election day.  His commie-loving son had just been caught trading arms for hostages with Putin in Russia, and only days after his Dad was on TV trying to scare everybody in America about the missing Czarist WMD’s in his foreign policy debate with Obama.

The Main Event

The spectacle of visible human suffering on election night 2012 was one I shall never forget.  A shot heard round the world.  The carnage was so total, and the chaos so complete, that at least one news anchor sprang from her perch running wildly about, on a frantic search to find somebody, anybody, who would confirm Karl Rove’s theory of a flat Earth.  This theory, bolstered by more than a quarter billion dollars of the most sophisticated research the Creation Science Institute could muster, added that extra touch of schadenfreude we’ve all come to expect in reality TV shows (or Slasher movies) produced over the last decade, so we at home were all thoroughly prepped for a big twist.

Nobody Could Have Predicted

That is, if we TOTALLY ignore this guy who had been repeated phoning, texting and emailing the Romney/Fox campaign extolling them NOT to volunteer to go down into that dark basement, but the promo trailers had been blasting America for months and it was clear from seeing those, that the Republican party was married to a stale plot device with the same loving ferocity Mitt has expressed towards the dim-bulb blonde he chose as his wife.  What a conundrum!!

Republican Reaction (Aftermath)

Dixie hadn’t experienced a November event anything nearly this tragic since Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864.  Obama, like Sherman had “destroyed much of the South’s physical and psychological capacity to wage war”.

Just like Lincoln in the aftermath of the Great Northern War of Aggression, Obama still has a bit of mopping up in order to ensure a proper southern reconstruction.  This task is particularly difficult considering the unrepentant and thoroughly unreconstructed “Sons of the Confederacy” pictured above in Oxford Mississippi.  This strapping band of Brooks Brothers racists were busy going Johnny Reb, burning Obama campaign material in pseudo effigy, just on the off chance they could re-inspire the spirit of nineteenth century racism.  The only thing missing were the white robes and official seal of the KKK, though to be honest, I think at least half of those folks had some type of cross dangling from a gold chain around their necks.  They try to keep their racism tucked under their tshirts, but sometimes there’s an accidental “nipple slip” that makes it past the seven second delay.

Insane US politics is only one of the many minor perturbations that I have been dealing with lately, though to be fair, the 2012 election seems to have consumed the entirety of the last four years.  The megaphones on Bullshit Mountain began blaring immediately after Obama was overwhelmingly swept into office back in 2008 (in lieu of the old soldier & his organ grinder monkey sideshow act).  Good times?  You Betcha’).

Just to give the Republicans a port in the very stormy seas of their defeat, I finally found an EXCUSE for them to pass around that doesn’t rely on Karl Rove under-counting the Black kids crowding the candy aisle at Walmart.  They can thank me later:

I’m out.

Enjoy.