Hey

Will one of you wieners recommend a decent technology BLOG that doesn't ride Steve Jobs dick? I've had both Gizmodo and Engadget in my regular rotation for a while now, but if I have to read one more post about what some C-list celebrity thinks of the iPad or one more editorial about how DRM isn't so bad now that Apple pushing it, I'm going to drive over to Brooklyn or wherever the fuck these nerds are based out of and beat them to death with a Newton.

Please leave suggestions in the comments.

I love you.

APPLE TABLET

APPLE TABLET

The New Gayest Thing Ever

Previously on (a) Waxeater, I crowned Videoblogs The Gayest Thing Ever. And they're still up there -- way, way up there -- but life is a contest in which we prove to whatever put us all here that it made a grievous error in allowing us to plow through resources that should have been reserved for much more awesome creatures, such as the squirrel, by constantly outgaying ourselves.

It is with that in mind that I strip the paper crown from videoblogs and place it onto the misshapen domepiece of Internet Product Reviewers, Particularly Those That Review iPhone Cases.

A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised at work with a brand new iPhone to replace my piece of shit Treo. While I loathe the thought of joining the ranks of people who give a shit what Steve Jobs is up to at any given moment, I was also relieved that I would no longer have to make fart noises with my mouth -- I could just download one of fifty or so available apps to do that for me. So I guess it's really a lateral move, at best.

Either way, I was handed an iPhone and expected to use it until it is replaced with some sort of 3D holograph phone a few years from now. And in that time, I'm fully expected to keep the thing in relatively good condition, so one of my first goals as a new, reluctant iPhone user was to quickly research and purchase a decent case. As is the case with the overwhelming majority of my purchases, I immediately headed to Amazon to check prices and -- though I should know better at this point -- read some reviews. Of course Internet consumer reviews aren't always a bad thing, and they've gotten a bit better now that Amazon has done away with anonymous reviews, or reviews written under a pseudonym (sorry ItalianStallion69), but the fact of the matter is that the Internet is full of crybaby malcontents with a deadly combination of broadband connection, too much free time, and no friends or companions to listen to their shitty, First World complaints. By now I've learned to ignore most of these and cherry pick the worthwhile reviews, which usually hover in the 2-3 percentile, but it was while looking for a fucking iPhone case that I allowed one particularly numbskull trend to inexplicably get under my skin: detracting stars from your review for an obscured Apple logo.

Before I continue, I know that it's stupid of me to be bothered by something so trivial (which is exactly what I'm accusing these people of), but motive is really important here. And the motives behind someone rating down a product because it obscures the small, silver logo of their favorite gadget company/cult is far more sinister than mine, so give me a goddamned break.

I won't quote specific reviews here because A) I'm not sure if that violates some sort of weird Amazon copyright and B) I'm far too lazy to poke through all of those reviews again, but there are a number of iPhone case reviews that pretty much go exactly like this:

"Well, the construction on this case is great; it's a very snug fit that provides easy access to all of the iPhone's buttons and rockers and whatever, and I've dropped my iPhone fifty times already without scratching or otherwise damaging the product in any way, but the case completely covers the Apple logo on the back of the phone. So for that I can only give it two stars out of five."

Rather than insult everyone's intelligence by explaining -- at length -- exactly why this so monumentally gay, I'll sum it up by saying that insisting the Apple logo on the back of your iPhone be visible to anyone looking at you is the nerd (and therefore infinitely worse) version of slapping an enormous, vinyl "TOYOTA" sticker across the windshield of your 1999 Maxima; not only are you falsely assuming that anyone gives a shit what kind of car you drive/phone you use, but you're making a point to ensure that the people who don't care know what kind of car you drive/phone you use. And chances are that the only people who are looking at you long enough to wonder what kind of phone you're using out of boredom so intense that they have quite literally already thought about every other imaginable thing in the known universe before turning their attention to what kind of cellular phone someone else prefers are most likely your shithead buddies, who either A) also have iPhones and therefore don't give a fuck because you are on perceived smartphone equal footing or B) have already listened to you verbally fellate your phone extensively while turning it around and around in a futile attempt to switch over to landscape mode while trying to read Gizmodo.

Before being handed an iPhone, which lead to the grisly discovery of Internet Product Reviewers, Particularly Those That Review iPhone Cases, Restaurants That Begin Their Beverage Sizing At Medium was a shoe-in for the new Gayest Thing Ever. But your late entry into the race became a landslide victory, so congratulations, dickdrips!

2009, in summation

Originally, I felt confident that the horror of 2009 could be summed up in one image:



But then I remembered that stuff like this also started to pop up throughout the year:



The worst part is that I had a legitimately hard time choosing between like four or five different (but unfortunately similar) bands to use as an example, but the above really proved itself to be the most embarassing.

Here's to hoping that 2010 blesses us with many more natural disasters.

The Generationals

When I hear a band like the Generationals, or like when I first heard the Pipettes back in 2006, I can't help but romanticize the early sixties a bit. But then I remember that A) pornography as we know it does not yet exist and I'd have to settle for jerking off to suggestive billboards and B) there are malt shops everywhere and I'm lactose intolerant, which is an enormous dicktease.

It does seem like a nice place to visit, though, so it's a shame that time travel has yet to become a reality. But once it does, I immediately plan to travel back to the early 90's and buy up a bunch of stupid domain names that I can sell to suckers for ludicrous amounts of money during the dot-com bubble.

This isn't an actual video for this song, by the way; I'm too lazy to figure out MP3 streaming on the Blogger platform.

Apparently meth turns yuppies into enormous faggots

Choice snippets from the Denver News article "72-Hour Party People". I guess this article is like four years old at this point, but whatever -- the point remains the same:

In the next room are Marcus, a custom interior house painter, and his wife, Heather, who works in marketing for a popular brand of whiskey. The happy couple is viewing a bootlegged DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on a big-screen TV while frantically flipping through a leather-bound edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic of the same name, trying to match the text to the movie. Whenever a line of dialogue is altered, a scene cut or a plot point relocated in the film, Marcus and Heather call it out to Sasha, a dreadlocked artist who's drawing a huge, elaborate pen-and-ink diagram on a sheet of butcher paper. The diagram's title is "Two Towers: Film vs. Book, a Deconstruction."

Aha, Heather exclaims, her voice charged with the thrill of discovery. "The Wold Riders never dragged Aragorn over the cliff on their way to Helm's Deep. That is total fucking Hollywood bullshit! Sasha, you got it?"

In the living room, Nick is seated across a marble chess set from Jason, a landscape architect wearing orange-tinted sunglasses. Surrounded by computer printouts, the pair have been playing for hours, re-creating 1997's epic seven-game rematch between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue move for move, playing each game all the way through, precisely as it was played by man against machine.

"This is so intense," declares Jason. "It's like I know what the computer was thinking."

For three hours now, Marcus and Nick have taken turns mixing records behind the set of dual turntables in the parlor. Their selections have proven quite eclectic: Michael Jackson mashed with Iron Maiden, Jamaican dancehall fading into French hip-hop, recordings of 1960s Black Panther rallies laid over "Sweet Home Alabama."

They talk over and across each other constantly, their conversations cross-pollinating, topics bursting into side topics and tangents: Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, West Nile virus, Alaskan salmon, cruise ships, Rastafarians, back-in-the-day MTV videos, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, drug laws, gun laws, cop shootings, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins. It goes on and on, ever-changing, devoid of weight. It is chitchat mania, right up until the discussion turns to why they're doing this, why they're sitting in a candlelit room on a workday morning, geeked out of their skulls.

Faced with this question, they fall silent for a few seconds, then take turns.

"I do it to feel like a kid again, to feel new again," says Emile, eliciting nods.

"Because I like to live fast and full," offers Sasha, who is licking her lips unconsciously and constantly.

Heather: "I guess I do it mostly because I get bored, and because of the extremeness of it, because I don't have to work today, and because fucking my husband when were both like this is godhead."

Ike: "Because I have really low self-esteem."

The room blows up in laughter.

Ike again: "No, seriously, I do it because I love to get high, pure and simple. I love to get high. I've got the gene. I just say yes."

"I have a poem I want everyone to hear," Marcus says, fishing a fresh bulb from the cardboard box of four General Electric 60-watts purchased earlier on the Strip. "It's about a moth and a lightbulb. I've memorized it for just this sort of five-star occasion."

His voice changes to that of a bereted poet giving a dramatic reading.

"I was talking to a moth the other evening," Marcus begins, thrusting the lightbulb up and away, then pondering it like Hamlet pondering a dagger. "He was trying to break into an electric lightbulb and fry himself on the wires."

Marcus pulls the lightbulb back, walks over to a dresser, and then, with one quick hammering motion, snaps off the bulb's aluminum screw-in plug. It falls to the carpet and he stares it for a second, then at the teardrop-shaped piece of glass in his hand, which now has a jagged hole at the fat end.

"I forget the next part," he says, weaving on his feet and staring into the bulb's hole like a drunken pirate staring through a spyglass. "But the guy who's talking the poem asks the moth why the fuck he's trying to fry himself on the light, and the moth says..."

And here Marcus goes into the voice of the moth, rendered high and reedy, as if he had just inhaled helium: "‘We get bored with routine and crave beauty and excitement. Fire is beautiful, and we know that if we get too close it will kill us, but what does that matter? It is better to be happy for a moment and burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while."

"Hell, yeah!" Bonnie says emphatically.

Marcus picks through the shards of Shabu on the dresser, chooses one the size of an almond sliver and drops it into the hole in the bulb. He asks for a lighter. Then he continues the poem, again in the voice of the moth.

"We wad all our life up into one little roll, and then we shoot the roll. It is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than it is to exist forever and never be a part of beauty. We are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves."

"No, wait, I fucked up."

He dances the flame of the lighter over the bulb. The Shabu inside bubbles, and smoke collects in the chamber of the bulb.

"I can only remember the last line, but before that, the moth flies into a lighter and dies, and the last line of the poem is the guy thinking to himself, ‘I wish there was something I wanted as badly as the moth wanted to fry himself.'"

Marcus inhales the smoke from the hole in the lightbulb. Moments pass in silence. He exhales sickly sweet.

Bonnie: "Wait, are you saying we're all moths?"

Remember when...

R. Kelly pissed all over that fourteen year old, fucked her, and then filmed the whole thing like an idiot? And then white people freaked out and black people were all like, "HE'S INNOCENT! IT WAS CGI/SHE WAS JUST A GOLD DIGGER!" Eventually the dude was cleared of all charges and was able to continue making the worst music known to man and pissing all over underage groupies. Black people celebrated their biggest victory since OJ Simpson and white people began enjoying his work ironically.

Now white people find themselves in an interesting position as Roman Polanski is finally being extradited back to the United States from France, which is where he slinked off to after drugging and raping (including anally) a thirteen year old in 1977 (back when he was forty-four years old). What a pussy.

Granted the dude made some good movies, but we as white people need to show a little backbone and some fucking consistency here. By forcing ourselves (myself not included since I'm not a yo-yo) to adopt some of these stupid excuses for the guy, we're not only showing the same sort of misguided loyalty we all anonymously made fun of black people for on the Internet, but we're also robbing ourselves of the chance to continue making R. Kelly/Little Man jokes (seriously, if you haven't seen this, stop reading this stupid shit immediately and check it out).

C'mon, white people; get your shit together.