Criticult.Com

So there's a new iPhone out, and within seconds of the official announcement hitting the internet the guy in the cubicle next to me at work was on his current cell phone gushing to someone about how wonderful it was.

Just because it was.

This is a friend of mine and although there's not much chance he'll ever read this I'll go ahead and point out that I bring this up just as a typical example of our culture's fascination with technology for technology's sake and not as anything personal. My friend has been trying to invent reasons to buy an iPhone since the day they came out, not necessarily because he needed one but because, well...you know...they're cool.

Yes they're cool all right but I can't help but notice the way people these days are in constant consumer mode, never happy with what they have and always fretting over the fact that there's a better, faster, shinier version of everything they own every time they turn around.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the iPhone, or against Apple. Apple helped invent desktop publishing, redefined what a mainstream personal computer could be and transformed the wireless industry with the aforementioned iPhone. They've done a lot of good.

They also make slick, elegant, relatively easy to use devices that sell at boutique prices, are difficult or impossible to upgrade and they do their best to make you feel like an idiot for not replacing it every year with a new one. It's insidious, but it is also genius because they have legions of loyal fans who worship Steve Jobs like a sweater-wearing rock star. At his beck and call they throw away all their disposable income on expensive, shiny gear that will be sitting in a landfill 16 months from now, but they clearly feel that the whole convenience and ease of use issue is an acceptable trade off for all those shortcomings.

To each their own. I guess I see the drunken furor over the new iPhone as symptomatic of how people are fascinated by gadgets, and not necessarily the usefulness or immediate necessity of the technology behind them.

Recently I was in Las Vegas on vacation (which is a whole other entry), standing at the Hard Rock with a vodka tonic in hand when I spot some UFC guys in town for a pay per view event on the other side of the bar. I am texting someone back home about this when suddenly I find myself being taunted by all my friends, and for what?

My cell phone. Now, you know how it is these days. Every where you go socially people are walking around with their Blackberrys, Chocolates, iPhones and whatever other flavor-of-the-week phone that's out conspicuously in hand as though they must be tinkering with it at all times or they'll miss something critical out of life. You know, the way when you're at a restaurant everyone has to have their phones out on the table in a sort of subliminal, unspoken line-in-the-sand competition to see who has the most ostentatious piece of mobile bling in the joint.

Nobody's phone actually ever rings, no they're not expecting a call. They're just hoping for one so that everyone will see them using their new Palm Centro with smoke screen, oil slick and laser pointer.

So, I whip out my good old Samsung SPH-A680 (Awkward name circa 2003, before they started naming cell phones after foods) to send some text and next thing you know people are treating me like I am carrying around an abacus. For Christ's sake, this phone is by no means state of the art any more but it does have a color screen, internet, text, gaming and email capability - all novelties at the time I bought it.

I just never use any of that crap, save the texting. I don't even have any of that other stuff on my plan. I don't even have any of those stupid, annoying custom ring tones. When my phone rings it just rings. Call me insane but my cell phone's primary purpose is to place and receive phone calls. I don't need or want to surf the net, send emails or watch movies on it. And I only got the texting turned on because a girl I was dating was always bitching that she couldn't text me.

"It's a phone. Why don't you just call me, as long as you're holding it?" I'd ask.

"Because, sometimes you don't have enough to say for a phone call."

"Well if you don't have anything to say you probably don't really need a phone."

Well, nobody ever said logic works on everyone. So, in the interest of getting some I did what I was asked. It's handy sometimes but it's mainly it's just a silly trifle.

It's a god damn phone, and it works great, has survived two trips through the wash and several drops from heights greater than four feet so you know what? One day when it stops working I'll look into a Nakatomi Whizbang 5000, but not before. I don't give a shit about you and your fucking iPhone or whether you can get stock prices and access You Tube in the middle of dinner at the Olive Garden.

Congratu-fucking-lations. Can it make phone calls? Well so can mine.

I'm no luddite - I have no fewer than ten functional PC's in my home (including an Apple IIe, by the way), three of them in regular use. But that's the thing. I am surrounded by technology at work and at home. Even my fucking car talks to me. I do want there to be at least 30 minutes of my life every day where I am not tethered to the internet or having a conversation with some form of artificial intelligence.

Plus, I am just not the sort of person who has to have all the latest shit just to say I have it. When I need it, I'll get it. When my 32 inch color TV, circa 1998 finally explodes in the middle of the Super Bowl XLIX, trust me I'll be down at the Best Buy in a flash to watch the rest of the game and then price HDTV's.

But not before.

I have an MP3 player. It's not an iPod, and it only has 4GB of memory, two of which I installed myself. My iPod owning jackass friends scoff at me as they wave their shiny new $500 32 GB iPod Touch in my face. Why did I not buy the flashiest, most expensive device available?

Well, I'll give Apple credit for finally lowering their prices on much of their product line but at the time I bought my player I wasn't prepared to spend more than $150 and the comparable iPod Nano to the one I did buy was a piece of shit with no screen.

Yeah, I have yet to understand how an MP3 player with no display is useful.

Sure you can get a 1GB iPod Shuffle for $50. That's fine if it works for you. But I'd suggest that if you only have $50 to spend on an MP3 player, it's possible that you have better things to do with your time than listening to music. Like, getting a job. Save up and buy something useful, my friend.

I found 4GB to be more than sufficient, because 4GB will hold about a week's worth of music, give or take. I can't imagine being away from a computer long enough to run out of stuff to listen to before I can load up again and if I am I am probably lost in the desert and have bigger problems than not having the Foo Fighters around.

Besides, whether your player holds 4GB, 40GB or four hundred, you can only listen to one song at a time, right? Now aren't you glad you paid for all that fucking space? Hey, get what works for you, but don't wave it in my face or act like because less is more for me that I have a problem.


Well fuck you and your overpriced toy. My little Sansa holds way more songs than I could possibly listen to if I were stuck up to my waist in cement for five days, it can show movies but why I would want to watch movies on my MP3 player when I can watch them on my television is beyond me. It can hold photos, but I already have a three year old five megapixel camera with 2GB of storage that I have used on approximately five occasions, so who cares? It even has an FM radio tuner, which is ironic because FM radio is what drove me to buy an MP3 player in the first place.

I just want to listen to music. You can keep all that other crap.

So, now that Apple is only charging $200 for the entry level iPhone, I say good on them. All they have to do is un-tether themselves from Ma Bell and they'll have something. But they'll have to wait until my trusty Samsung dies and there's no indication that's going to happen before 2010.

And when I do finally buy one of those flashy new handsets, do you know what I am going to do with it?

Place and receive 150 minutes a month of phone calls, just like I do now.

Labels: Extra Stength Tylenol, Gadgets, iPhone, lemmings, Steve Jobs

I have formed a team with my friends and family and will be participating in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life event on June 27 to raise money for cancer research. My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer a couple of months ago and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. I hope my small gesture can help to end the suffering for others so they don't have to experience what she is going through.

Please click the link below for more information and consider making a donation. It is for a great cause and every little bit, no matter how small, is another drop adding to a hell of a big pool.

Thanks for reading.

click here to visit my team site

Labels: cancer, donations, personal, relay

So continuing to provide me with evidence that Hollywood needs to be burned to the ground for the good of the world of cinema comes word that Brett Ratner (excuse me, Brett FUCKING Ratner) plans to bring the same "magic" to the Beverly Hills Cop series that he brought to the Rush Hour (and X-Men) series.

Fuck. Ducks.

So let me get this straight. Eddie Murphy, who hasn't had a movie that was worth a shit since Bowfinger, is teaming with Brett "I took over the reins of X-Men 3 and managed to make the worst comic book movie since Dolph Lundgren's Punisher" Ratner to resurrect a franchise that was PREVIOUSLY resurrected with the abomination (and cleverly titled) Beverly Hills Cop 3? So now Hollywood is re-launching series that ALREADY HAD RELAUNCHES?

Piss off.

Seriously, this has got to stop. What GOOD can come of Beverly Hills Cop 4? Will Danny Glover pop up occasionally to say "I'm too old for this shit."? My GOD. I could get through "Indiana Jones and the Not Really an Indiana Jones Movie but Good Enough in the Kingdom of George Lucas' Fucking Obsession with the 1950's" purely on the charisma of Harrison Ford and some great action scenes. But THIS is just too much. Eddie Murphy jumped over the shark so many times he's a frequent flyer.

And FUCK Brett Ratner right in his stupid face. X-Men 3 was a goddamn travesty and if you disagree, I will fight you.

They should just call it Beverly Hills Cop 4: Meh and move on.

Labels: Brett Ratner, Eddie Murphy, meh

There comes a time with every decade – usually 20 years on or so – where pop culture, ever more out of original ideas, decides to strip mine a previous generation's formative years for cultural riches.


As you may or may not have noticed it's been the 1980's turn for some time now. Having experienced my most coagulative years during this time this in some ways reinforces the sense of nostalgia we all feel to some degree for the past and in other ways sickens me immensely. Few things make you feel old and insignificant faster than watching something like The Wedding Singer and hearing yourself say “You know there were more than five songs written between 1981 and 1990.”


Or, watching the recent NBC remake of Knight Rider, wondering why it sucked so hard, and then remembering – Knight Rider was always garbage. You just didn't realize it when you were twelve.


And then there's another, seldom mentioned by product of the 1980s that like Chernobyl and Fine Young Cannibals nobody wants to talk about but to this day has left an indelible scar across modern society that may never be healed.


I speak of course about that wretched form of social Marxism called Political Correctness. Now permanently stamped onto society's back end like a bad graduation night tattoo, believe it or not Political Correctness did not always exist. Oh, it's been a part of leftist thinking since early in the 20th Century but it didn't really begin to permeate American culture and manifest itself into the law books and the general social lexicon until the 1980's.


Great. I was born just in time.


You remember when fraternity movies were funny because they were able to make fun of how exclusionary and yes – sometimes racist many fraternities are? (Yes, satire works best with holding a mirror up - tongue in cheek - to the ugly truth). Do you remember when hard rock was more fun because it was sexist and apolitical? (Anyone who takes that sort of excess seriously has their own issues. The password is: repression!) Do you remember when people were just black, white or Asian instead of Something-American? (Yet the people who were here originally aren't referred to by their tribal association, just ubiquitously as 'Native Americans'. Another gift from their European conquerors!) When the only girls on the field during football games were holding pom-poms? (Reporters used to wait till after the game to ask players how they 'feel'.) When Ace was the place with the friendly hardware man? (Yet they still use the song...) Or how about when 'developmentally challenged' people were simply retarded?


Really, despite the available pejorative meaning, 'retarded' already means 'developmentally challenged'.


Yes, those were simpler times.


All that has changed now – people feel that by limiting what we can say or how we say it that it will somehow prevent us from also thinking it and thereby eliminate it from existence. If you can prevent people from expressing what they're thinking, it will somehow keep them from thinking it. You know, the way placing electrical tape over your check engine light will fix your engine. Slathering a nice layer of socially repressive cement into the faults between us will do us more good than actually talking about them.


Yes, the virulent social deconstruction that is Political Correctness is pernicious not just because it aims to homogenize society into a bunch of docile, myopic intellectual peasants – it also threatens to drive the way real people think and act underground, making normal human behavior seem subversive.


Why do you suppose shows like The Simpsons, South Park or Family Guy are considered so subversive – or for that matter are animated? Because animation is still considered an innocent form of entertainment by most Americans and therefore is – ironically – one of the last refuges of free thought in American society. A live action show could never get away with the things the Griffin family does on Family Guy. But the truly sad thing is how many of us enjoy watching a cartoon family think and act the way most of us already do not as an act of admission but because the subversion lies in pretending we're not really watching ourselves!


But there's a point to this intellectual treadmill I am on and I should get to it. The widespread tidal forces in society that beg us not to offend one another by thinking honestly, acting true to our nature or speaking forthrightly have now begin to infest the food we eat. I now know the end of Western Civilization is truly at hand. When even your food begins spouting Marxist pabulum at you it won't be long before the crossing guard is goose stepping your kids cross the street. I speak now of fortune cookies.


I ordered Asian-American® food today and after finishing my spicy shrimp whatever it was found a couple of fortune cookies. Curious, I opened them to find the following two sayings:

Huh? Okay, full disclosure – I have eaten at this place before and have noticed that all their fortune cookies are full of soporific blather like that. I remember reading somewhere – and it may be myth – that the normally honest, occasionally thought provoking Confucianism of traditional fortune cookie sayings like...









...was off putting for many people, to the extent that fortune cookies more commonly appear stocked with hackneyed nonsense like what I found. Great, so first of all are you telling me people actually think that a dessert can predict your future? Second, you're telling me they believe it to the point that like a true friend, they'd rather their dessert coddle them with banality rather than inform them with the truth?


Yes, it's true. Your food is now PC. Since the key to self improvement – as an individual or a society is to face your weaknesses and shortcomings, come to terms with them honestly and grow as a result is too hard, we prefer to cover it all up with revisionism and euphemism. Most people used to be lazy, unmotivated or stupid. Now everyone has ADHD! Just take a magic pill that removes your personality and not only will you become less ignorant, you'll no longer be responsible for your constant lack of achievement!


No, you can't call that person handicapped, even though 'handicapped' simply means 'disabled'. You need to call them 'disabled', which of course means 'handicapped'. Rejoice! You're not a 'trash man', you're a 'sanitation engineer'! Not only would I love to hear Stephen Hawking explain some of the governing scientific principles of 'sanitation engineering', I'd like to point out that 'trash man' means 'man who picks up trash'. That's what you do. If you don't like it then do something about it rather than relying on me to soften the blow by calling you something you're not.


And one more thing – and I am talking to you, Jesse Jackson - I'm not African-American (for those under 30 - no, that's not really me in my profile photo). I've never set foot in Africa in my life and my blood is enough of a social cocktail of influences I'm comfortable simply calling myself – are you sitting down? - an American.


And if you don't like it, here's a fortune for you:




Now there's something you could still say in 1985. I think I'll go pop in The A-Team season one and fondly reminisce about the America I knew as a boy.

Labels: Family Guy, fortune cookies, George Peppard, retard

I find it amusing that media pundits, desperate to find something to talk about now that the Obama/Wright controversy(?) has started to finally wind down, think that the box office performance of Iron Man will be affected by the release earlier this week of Grand Theft Auto IV.

In case you have been living with Osama bin Laden in a cave, I should tell you that Iron Man is the movie that people that don't like movies plan to see. The super-hero flick that your comic hating friends/family/and significant other are beating down the door to get tickets to.

These experts reached this conclusion based on the preposterous theory that Halo 3 affected the poor box office performance of The Heartbreak Kid back in September. Yes, that must have been the problem. Well done, folks. You've solved the mystery.

This is why media experts are fucking tossers.

The Heartbreak Kid did poorly because it looked like a shit movie. Iron Man will do well because it looks fucking spectacular and Robert Downey Jr. rocks whatever movie he deigns to take part in. If you disagree, watch Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and get back to me.

So no, I don't think there is a correlation here, people. Move along.