Looks like Wired is trying to break the mode, crack the code on the matter. 100, 100, 1 — SOS!

I have nothing against holding fishes, but I’ve never done it. I’m ready, though! Can one be brought to me?

This is my story, which was mostly written via email into my blackberry, hence the thumb-esque conan-speak, thumb-spelling and general lack of definite articles. Liberties were taken, but not many. thank you to juan for inspiring me to get back in the game. See you next year!

2:54pm

Sitting outside (not on line; on bench) apple store in clarendon va. Appx 50-60 people in line to buy the iPhone 3G. Looks to be the feel-good hit of the Summer.

Riot about to break out; Apple citizens in line shouting at hired line security thugs re: ‘line not moving in over two hours’. Wish blackberry world edition had camera / video, because I think I could get famous. I think it’s about to be set off, football hooligan-style. People are baking in the sun and not happy. Boiling heat, summer stench. Plus every third person that walks by starts laughing / taking camera phone pictures of people in line, taunting, irritating. this is what happens when an apple store is between a williams sonoma and some boutique clothery. like most apple stores aren’t. i assume this is happening everywhere. a happening.

Family of filthy rednecks (what are they doing in Clarendon; I hope they’re reading this over their dialup connections) just walked by line and loudly proclaimed ‘hick hick why don’t those idiots just buy it from ameeezon dot com hick?’. iPhoneists in line, so angry, shouted epithets at family of inbreeds, which included small children (both in the family, and doing the shouting from the line). The apple user backlash is full steam, bi-directional. This fun / comedy almost makes up for not having an iphone. Although these people on the ready line are my brothers, I am slightly removed… watching the game, not in the line. Too lazy. So lazy. Glad apple makes it hard to buy their products.

I’m supppoed to be at friend Steve’s birthday party in a few hours, but I don’t think I can leave this scene; previously unknown journalistic impulses surfacing. Plus, if the line trickles to zero, I’m in there to win.

surly Line-dwellers just yelled at secuirity ‘get us some cokes or something!!!’. Security: ‘you get back in line! You get back in line!’. I couldn’t make this up. Keep an eye on cnn — I swear there is going to be a riot. Let’s kick it off. I can’t report the truth[1].

3:30pm

Just saw 20-something 9 month pregnant woman on line. Should she be there? Does she have to be there? Is the iphone for the fetus? What if she calves right here? My god, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, we could have a mucus plug, amniotic fluid, and a new life (undoubtedly apple-supporting, as it should be) to deal with in realtime. Maybe that would help her get forward in the line, which is not moving.

This apple store is in a fake ‘fancy towne‘ that is retail below, apartments directly above. People are sitting on balconies, drinking sangria and cold beer, spectating, taunting. That’s the way to do it.

Line is _not_ moving. Has not moved in the 46 minutes I’ve been sitting here. Sun was behind a cloud for a few minutes, but now bacl with a vengence. They’re burning, burning! Ow! - a goddamn bird bit me on the ankle! What the fuck? The woman next to me is throwing bread to the birds, and also watching the Apple iPhone people. My ankle is not bread, budgie, although it may be pastey and doughy! I should stamp you down like a pigeon, yet I am merciful.

3:50pm

Amusement: person walks up to iGoons claiming to want to purchase a mac book pro (ie something apple isn’t losing money on today, like the iPhone). igoon points legitimate man to end of the line. “But I’m not buying an iphone!’. Pointed to end of the line. Then, other line security guy seems to understand ramification and runs inside, presumable to get orders from manager / Jon Ives and Steve Jobs personally. If those guys don’t have the 60’s style red Batphone set up today, I don’t know when they do. Which means: they never do.

Ok… There are now two lines, coming from opposite directions, one short, one long. Maybe there is a batphone! Maybe short one is for non-iphone purchases (goons maybe snapped out of it). Maybe I should buy a macbook too so I can get in the short line…seems reasonable. Don’t need a macbook. still seems reasonable. Tiring of this scene.

4:00pm

Got sick of that scene, now walking back to my car, evaluating plan B. Need to be at steve’s in about two hours. Two girls walking through garage, overhear them: “I can’t believe those idiots are standing in line to give Apple their $300, then AT&T their $130 a month.” I want to tell these wenches to shut their watering holes, because we’re talking about the iPhone. Show respect. But it would do no good. They don’t understand. A Plan is formulating. I could still have justice today.

4:30pm

Now driving in concentric circles (ever-widening) around northern virginia hitting “legitimate” at&t retail stores (since the resellers don’t have them), hoping to score, licking my lips, ready to win.

First one I hit was in fairfax at the corner of 29 and 50. There was iphone 3g material and banners in the windows. It was packed, and there was a guy at the door with a clipboard of names and a pen. I figured these were good omens, but the feeling didn’t last.

‘Hello dere!’ Handing me pen. ‘Are you here for non-iphone-related-blah-blah-woof-woof-promotion-for-some-crappy-non-iphone?’. This was bad, but I’m not an asshole. ‘Hi! No! I’m here for an iphone. Do you have any?’ Confused look. ‘No, we don’t have those..’

Yes, of course. After all, why would you? Its not like you work for one of the only two retail outlets selling them, and its not like its the biggest retail event of the year. My bad for asking. I hand him his pen back without stabbing him in the eye with it.

Now in chantilly va at a mega strip-mall. Did you know that best buy (this one, anyway) now sells apple computers and musical instruments? Huh. No iPhones. Hungry like the wolf.

Have learned that if you send a text to googl (no e), with a search string, it sms’s you back with data. Thanks, Mike. 2% safer than googling on blackberry while driving on route 66…

5:30pm

Hit AT&T stores all over hell and gone (Chantilly, Centreville, Fairfax, etc etc etc), no joy. Consider going to Apple Store at Fair Oaks mall, but am now 30 minutes away from steve’s, and need to be there in 30 or so. Fair Oaks is probably a mess anyway.

Get email from my boss, who is begging me to hold off / buy a unit through our i.t. when we’re ready. He’s a good man. He’s trying to do the right thing. unfortunately his message has a legitimacy issue due to the fact he already owns a first gen iphone. But he’s still full of ideas:

omg. how about if you buy an ipod touch to hold you over? 97.946% of all iphone time is consumed by things that don’t involve a phone (these stats are conservative). the app store, omg, is the sigle-most dangerous thing to have at your fingertips. btw, mobileme/push functions are just now starting to work occasionally. IPOD TOUCH!!

to which I respond:

My issue with the touch is the distinct lack of phone.

But thanks for trying to help.

after which i’m mocked for my married-ish behavior.

6:00pm

Arrive at Steve’s. He has downloaded iPhone 2.0 for his first gen, and shows me Super Monkey Ball (irritating), Pandora (awesome XM-radio killer), and an app that makes lightsaber sounds when you whip your phone around (like a lightsaber). I almost leave immediately (five minutes after arrival) to go back to clarendon and get online. But unfortunately Boss Tom has called me again and asked me firmly to promise not to get an iPhone until I can get it through i.t. / switch my cell number over. I cave. I feel so worthless.

Another apple nerd at Steve’s party, “Dan”, tells me that he and his wife were are Fair Oaks earlier in the day to check out the Apple Store scene / potentially breathe on an iphone 3g. He indicated that line was over 200 idiots long (how quickly I turn to eat my own when failure is complete), and ran from the store itself into the center part of the mall, where disney-style rope line-controllers had been set up. Awesome. Guess it’s good I held off on fair oaks.

Bitter Afterword — stop reading now

Thank you, Apple, for making it impossible to buy your product. In this case, it wound being for the better. Still, I hate you for it, since I could, at this moment, be using an iPhone I paid $300-out-of-pocket for, as opposed to the hypothetical one I’ll be getting (maybe for less, who knows what I can negotiate) in the future. Too tired to be filled with rage. Beer will help ease the pain.

But I want to make sure, not that anyone at apple (or anyone at all) is actually reading this, that I make something clear. This experience, no matter how negative, is not going to keep me from buying an iphone. It’s not like there’s another option I’m interested in. It was easy to hold off on the gen one due the price, lack of Exchange integration, and the certainty of apple gen-1-technology-itis. I’m not going to be childish and go buy a zune or some other piece of shit just because apple decided the iphone had to be activated in-store, then didn’t remotely have the infrastructure ready to handle it. I’m going to get an iphone, just like I’m going to keep buying macs, because I am a nerd and I like the way apple products make me feel about myself. I’ve owned a current mac since my dad bought me a mac 512k when i was a young punk playing Deja Vu and Falcon. Clearly there’s no illusion re: what I’m writing this on. say my name, bleyotch.

I’m just going to bitch about it, as I have here, and leave off with an open question to whoever at apple, in some parallel universe, reads this: does it make you feel good to irritate your loyal customers, or even your first time ones? I’m also a shareholder (2002 was a good year to buy apple stock), so if there is some secret sauce in the formula that directly/positively impacts shareholder value, I’d love to hear about it.

If I wanted to wait in lines, I’d go back to russia… which I’ve never been to. Get it?

[1] While this somewhat orbits the truth, it’s not quote so. But still somewhat. I want to avoid slander-lawsuits. Oh no:

“No. We would never do that.”

Time to get out.

To its credit, the guitar sound on the chorus of “Let It Die” makes me want to play music in a dark, carpeted, semi-finished basement. So it will be… right after I get Leopard / iLife 08 installed next Friday, aka “The Day Leading Into the Least Productive (from a non-computer perspective) Weekend In Recent History”.

Also positively, it’s not the Quato-esque abortion that was 2005’s In Your Honor. Which is maybe why it’s good, in the “it’s better than bad”, “Log” sense.

We all know how “down with the times” I am… but in this rare case I’m being relatively good, as Grindhouse only came out two months ago.

I’ve only seen the first feature, and I can already declare it the greatest film of all time.

It is truly the Citizen Kane of homage-to-seventies-sexploitation-and-violence flicks. And the music rocks.

And Rose MacGowan, back in the Doom Generation days, was a stone, villianous fox. Then she was on Charmed and all that and married the prince of darkness for a while (rebellious teens), and I think had some plastic surgery, and it was like, wha happened? But now she’s here as a go-go dancer, then she get stumped, then they attach a table leg to the stump, which is hot, and for the coup de grace… well… we all know by now.

I’m on the fence as to whether I’m going to even watch Tarantino’s portion (Death-Proof). Kinda don’t want to ruin the perfection.

I like how the web page describes it as only a ’semi-extreme’ performance. I guess a fully extreme performance would have to involve Kris Angel.

Flatland!

I know that for some of you, lack of fresh blog content here is tantamount to lack of sufficient oxygen, and I would apologize… but You need to get a life. and i’m speaking to a population of no one. so it’s all ok.

But check this: such sentiment is meaningless in the face of the POWER of the triumphant return of trapped in the closet starting in 7/07.

oh yes. in the past, i’ve alternatively warned against getting trapped in the closet, and embracing ‘trapped in the closet’. if none of this is resonating, go back to the place where it all began, and prepare yourself for what is to come.

I’m hoping the heart-stopping screech my computer just emitted at the end of this install process was a result of some unrelated situation (ex. the 150 deg F internal temperature) as opposed to a feature of Google Desktop for OS X.

No, this is not the severed head of a techno-bauhaus muppet, and this object and I do not belong to a secret, bare-knuckle boxing ‘fight club’. You are looking at me holding a battery that was once in my Mac Book Pro 17″.

One afternoon, after a particularly scorching Parallels session, I was moving my MBP to another room when I noticed that the aluminum battery cover was sort of, uh, visibily warped. More accurately, I noticed that the MBP’s underside was hot enough to fry a proverbial egg, but there’s really nothing new about that. Then I noticed the bulge.

Deciding it was time to ‘cool it down’ (or was it cool it now, per New Edition?), I ejected the battery, checked it out, thought ‘huh, that’s funny’ and put it on my desk for later inpection/action.

Some time later, I came back to my office to find the battery as you see it in this picture. I guess as it cooled from ~150 deg f to room temp, it expanded or contracted (or whatever things do when they cool off), and the battery pack sort of popped like a kernel of popcorn. Or something.

Well, better this than a spray of molten battery material to the face. Not that I’m saying that has ever happened with this sort of Apple battery, because that would be slander.

This is probably similar (or identical) to the 15″ MacBook Pro battery bulge/warp issue that Apple has an automated recall page for. AppleCare replaced it with zero argument (thanks Jason).

The moral of the story is: Don’t… um, well. I’m not sure what to tell you not to do. Perhaps: as with breast and testicular cancer, pro-active scanning of odd lumps or bulges in your Apple battery is perhaps the best method to head off any long-term difficulties or mutilating explosions. An ounce of prevention…

Now she’s so happy! She’s plotting the use of her weather-domination device!

He’s a good guy, that Sanjaya. Girl, you really got him now.

And he needs to leave the show. He shouldn’t be there. For the good of the hunger-strikers.

I can grasp the hubub over A Million Little Pieces and this chick, to a degree. Although I haven’t read either one’s work (and probably never will, LIARS!), I doubt either volume features a 20-page forward attempting to convince the reader that every word is the non-embellished truth. But I really don’t know, to be honest. And it’s not the point.

But when Gawker goes after David Sedaris, who is basically a comedian, and I don’t think makes any real pretense that what he’s saying is completely (or even remotely) true, what hope is there for anyone who wants to write anything another human would want to read, given that if we are to “write what we know”, we would only write a series of facts so mundane as to literally and instantly vaporize the reader[1]?

Is the assumption that writing about family/work life implies strict adherence to the truth, and that there shouldn’t be fiction that has vague roots in a “typical” and some might say “boring” everyday situations? If so, I missed that day of… whatever class I didn’t take that would have discussed this topic.

If so, the potential global pool of potential authors would be reduced to Noam Chomsky, and him… only maybe. I’m reading Hegemony or Survival right now, and who else has ever heard of this so-called “Cuban Missle Crisis”? You’re not Tom Clancy, Noam — stick to the facts.

What, you say? Gawker is a highly ironic, metrosexually-oriented “news” site, primarily focused on the discussion of people (like, ehr, David Sedaris) that most of non-metrosexual America has never heard of? And that this exaggerated “outing” of Sedaris’s lies is, itself, meant to be ironic? I might, like Alanis Morrissette, have a problem with the whole irony concept.

[1] There, I exaggerated. Did it kill you?

Kelley and I are in agreement regarding the current state: those were twelve people who had to go. Too bad the twelve remaining all f****ng suck.

Where is the Elliot Yamin, where is the Katherine McPhee, where is the Iron Man of this competition?

I’d like to take a moment and suggest that we all remember her as I saw her when I was a fourteen year-old boy — posing in her prime in Playboy[1].

Please do this as opposed to remembering her torrid marriage to the rich old guy, the torrid fight to get the money, the torrid weight gain and subsequent bizarre reality show, and the torrid death of her first son.

And, now, her own what-I-can-only-suspect- will-be-torrid death. I am a horrible person.

[1] I’m going to leave it at that in terms of level of detail regarding the remembrance of things past.

We’re three episodes into the second and final season of HBO/BBC’s excellent Rome, a show that distinguished itself last season with the perfect mix of nudity, honor, betrayal and abject violence.

Of course, since this is “history”, we all know how it ends: with Liz Taylor marrying Richard Burton in a rocket-fueled torpor. But things seems to be lopsided this season so far… let’s hope they’re saving up for the endgame:

[ image source

Hey, elia: Way to step forward and tentatively complain re: Wolverine’s “cheating”, for a gain of zero yards, seconds before your head rolled.

Elia: [Vague references to Wolverine's cheating][1]

Judge that is indistinguishable from Billy Joel’s child bride from season 1:
[You mean there was cheating] today?

Elia: Uh, no…

Words of advice for the future: Don’t be a puppet, especially Mark Renton’s.

Double props for Colicchio for: “I don’t care what happens in the kitchen”, perhaps the line of the season, and for Sam for kicking out while maintaining grace / not getting trapped in the puppet show.

So much for Top Chef being “the reality show where nice guys win”, as we’re down to two egomaniacs in the final round. As it should be.

[ image source ]

[1] You can see how I’ve earned my many awards for excellence in journalism.

thanks to neil.