Caution: Lawyers involved

Recently I received, as a birthday present, a nice t shirt which included the lat/lon of the town I live in. It's a nice gift with a nautical theme that I like a lot.

The best part was the "disclaimer" that was stuck on the shirt, obviously a pointed poke at companies run by lawyers who insist on putting warnings, no matter how absurd, on anything they sell.

Oxymoron of the Week

Sent to you by Charlie via Google Reader:

Oxymoron of the Week

via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs by Steve on 1/22/08

From eWeek: The 25 Most Influential People at IBM. I mean, they have to be kidding, right? The slideshow depicts a lineup of IBM lifers. It looks like an ad for Depends. Or Polident. Nobody in the entire industry has ever heard of any of these guys. Number 10 on the list is so influential that eWeek couldn't find a photo for him. Yeah. He's a big swinging dick all right. Trust me, these old bastards are lucky if they can influence their bladders to sneak a little pee past their swollen prostates.

Meanwhile in other IBM news I've got my own little bone to pick with the Original Borg. Last week the retards who do marketing for Lotus Notes, IBM's ass-ugly email system, went around bragging that they were about to announce a version of Notes that runs on iPhone. Supposedly they were going to announce this at their big LotusFear conference this week.

Well that put me through the fucking roof. As I pointed out to my guys last week, What the fuck are these inbred morons doing announcing something to do with iPhone without clearing it with us first? Shut the motherfuckers down. Like, now. And who the fuck ever said they could put their software on my Jesus phone in the first place? Putting Notes on iPhone is like getting out a piece of exquisite Wedgwood china and using it to serve a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you ever seen Notes? It's not software, it's a form of punishment. Companies that use Notes have to staff not only a help desk but also a suicide prevention center -- it's that bad. Even the poor bastards at IBM, who are forced to use it, do nothing but complain.

So a bunch of our ninjas flew out to Cambridge and rounded up these morons from Lotus marketing and bitch-slapped them until they cried for mercy. Today the Big Brains at Lotus PR put out a statement saying the whole Notes-on-iPhone claim was just a bad dream, and Notes for iPhone is not ready yet. Real slick.

Buried down low in the latest story, however, is a real gem of a quote: "Kevin McIsaac, an analyst at research firm IBRS, said he's not sure Lotus Notes will have a large impact on enterprise adoption of the device. `I can't really imagine someone who's really hip and cool--like an iPhone user--wanting to use Lotus Notes,' he said."

Amen to that, my brother.

Meanwhile, in the "Definition of Sad" category, check this out -- some marketing fuckwit from Lotus is live blogging the Lotus conference. Big news like this:

7:52 AM A shoutout to Colleen Campbell, Lotus Marketing program director, sitting next to me here in the second row while Sandra Marcus is dancing in front of me! Is this a conference or a party?!?!


I know, right?!?! It's amazing!!!!????!?!?!?! It's not even 8 in the morning and we are rockin it!?!?! We r Lotus n we r 2 kewl!?!

What really saddens me, however, is the idea that somewhere out in some forlorn sad corner of the world someone is actually following this live blog and actually cares what Lotus announces and maybe even wishes he could be there in Orlando to experience the rock concert excitement in person.

To those people I say this: I will pray for your souls.

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Being funny isn't so easy

I've always been a fan of the New Yorker and its cartoons and always thought it would be an easy way to make a living. However, when they started the caption contest at the back of the book I realized how hard it can be. Isn't that always the case -- an end product that is concise, well constructed is often incredibly difficult to achieve.

(Reminds me of a conversation in college when we were all sitting around marveling at how much money was made over such simple things such as Post-It Notes, etc. Someone then challenged the group to come up with an equally simple, and profitable, idea by the end of the night. Suffice to say I'm still thinking.)

Here's a fascinating look at the selection process for New Yorker cartoons from the Washington Post. An excerpt:

Picking cartoons isn't as easy as it looks. "The funniest cartoon is not
necessarily the best cartoon," says Mankoff. "Funnier means that you laugh
harder, and everybody's gonna laugh harder at more aggressive cartoons, more
obscene cartoons. It's a Freudian thing. It gives more relief. But is it a
better joke? To me, better means having more truth in it, having both the humor
and the pain and therefore having more meaning and more, uh, uh . . . " He
searches for a word, then finds it: "poetry."

Rules for reading the newspaper

I won't tell you how many of the seven I do but it's more than one. From Garrison Keillor in Salon.

It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing
from their lives: the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at
computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing
them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and
check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena. It is so lumpen, so sad that
nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy
and smart.