Young Man Yells At Cloud

New York — The New York Knicks announced today that patient zero of Linsanity, Jeremy Lin, will be out for six weeks after he undergoes surgery for a torn meniscus in his left knee. 

As I reported earlier, the press exploded when former Denver Broncos QB was kicked out/released to the New York Jets, mostly because they had nothing better to do but also because it would be the collision of two huge storylines. Sports are all about storylines. 

Anyway, Lin’s surgery clearly shows that God intends for Tebow to be his #1 rep in New York City. This must hurt for Lin, who did a great job representing himself, his religion, and most importantly, allowing borderline racist puns in sports media. 

This is a huge blow to people who like to project their beliefs and aspirations onto people who get paid large sums of money to stay in shape and play a game. 

Raleigh, NC —Native North Carolinian Carole Marks had big dreams when she grew up.

“All through elementary and junior high school, I wanted to go to college and be a doctor,” Ms. Marks said, “but then my Dad got laid off from his factory job of over 20 years, and my mom’s pension took a huge hit after the financial crisis.”

Now her dreams are gone.

“It was heartbreaking at first, but working at Starbucks isn’t too bad. A lot of my co-workers re college graduates anyway, so at least I don’t have to worry about debt.”

Ms. Marks is one of millions of Americans who are casting their last shreds of faith in the American Dream into Friday night’s Mega Millions jackpot drawing. 

People across the United States will watch the selection of the record $640 million Mega Millions lottery drawing tonight in what some cultural critics are calling “the most desperate day in American history.”

Making things even more difficult for Ms. Marks is the knowledge that her chance to win is less than her chances of being struck by lightning or being bitten by a shark. 

“I know the odds aren’t in my favor, especially because the only people who ever win are old or work in a factory, ” Ms. Marks said during her break at the popular coffee chain, “but at least it gives me something to believe in.”

Before President Obama was elected and ended racism forever, people liked to call Bill Clinton the first Black President for some combination of reasons that didn’t really make him black but we thought we were decades away from a black president so America kind of just went with it. 

Anyway, a controversial magazine named The Conservative Teen, which exists to combat the horrible liberal biases found in Highlights, published a controversial story suggesting that Ronald Reagan was the first black president.

I did not read the story because in 2012 analysis is post-content, so I will make some assumptions about what the story actually said. 

- Reagan was President during Eddie Murphy’s prime, while Obama has failed to raise Eddie Murphy to his 1980’s levels.

- Article means “black” as in “dark”, assumes that Reagan was a dark magician practicing voodoo economics (trickle down). 

- Reagan knew a black person, making him the first black president by the transitive property of blackness. 

San Bruno, Calif — YouTube shocked the tech world today when it announced that it will replace its popular video-sharing website with a new system that allows users to upload single images with text of what the person person said in text filling up to 50 percent of the image. 

“We at YouTube pride ourselves in staying true to our consumers desires, and what they desire are less videos with sound and moving images, and more still photos with text on them,” YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar said in a statement Thursday. 

Mr. Kamangar said YouTube decided to make the switch when they noticed people on social networking sites sharing images with text instead of the videos already on the website. 

“In this fast paced 21st century world, people don’;t have time to wait for videos to buffer, and we as a company will just have to deal with that, ” Mr. Kamangar said.

As an attempt to stay ahead, YouTube is reportedly working on a content-less video that can just make people happy or sad. 

Earth — A new survey reveals that all of humanity is sharing one Netflix account in an attempt to get around the exorbitant $7.99 monthly fee. 

The single Netflix account is registered to Kelly Franklin of Providence, Rhode Island. Ms. Franklin created the account in 2009. Her account has been accessed billions of times by people in every nation. Ms. Franklin has no idea how how so many people got her password. 

“I gave it to my cousin Sophia so she could watch Arrested Development. I guess she must have lost the slip of paper that I wrote my password on,” Ms. Franklin said. 

Netflix stock tanked in reaction to the news, which is another in a long line of issues for the digital movie distributor. CEO Reed Hastings held a press conference yesterday to address rumors of the company’s financial trouble.

“We’re not dicks, so we won’t limit the number of devices one account can be streamed on simultaneously, however, we do ask that every living soul be cool and just pay for an account. We’ll even throw in a free month,” Mr. Hastings said. 

The plea will likely fall on deaf ears, as Ms. Franklin’s acccount is popular across the world. 

“I was reluctant to get Netflix because of the price, but now that I have Kelly’s account, I love it,” North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-un said. 

The New York Times is one of the best written, well-respected, and remaining of the physical content farms from the pre-internet era. While most of their work is great, they do have the bad habit of writing “trend pieces” and things that aren’t actually trends at all. This time, young professionals who do not own smart phones. 

Though my phone elicits stares in the soigné precincts of New York, I’m just one member of a small but hardy contingent (a convoy, if you will) of smartphone holdouts, people who seem like the ideal iPhone owner (under 40, urban, professional) but shun it and its app-friendly cousins for a low-tech “dumbphone.”

 See, he acknowledges that he has the means for a smartphone, but chooses against it for what a low-tech “feature phone.”

 Fifty-eight percent of 25-to-34-year-olds (my own demographic) own smartphones. And in certain social strata, to not own one is the mark of an outsider.

In particular, an outsider who really wants attention badly so people will remark on how “unique” he or she is. 

As Kristin DiPasquo, 33, a second-grade teacher in Philadelphia who dislikes the distractibility and expense of smartphones, said: “A group of four of us was hanging out, and none of us had a smartphone. It was definitely like, ‘Wow, look at us!’ ”

It’s good that she was honest about doing it for the attention. This group of four Luddites would be the people in the 90’s who proudly proclaim that they don’t have TV or cable because they “cost money”

As for his personal life, he said he doesn’t require “an application to tell me where in the city I am or what restaurants are near me.”

 ”I don’t need a car, I have a horse.” - This guy in 1920

“I don’t need the internet, I have encyclopedias.” - This guy in 1996

“I don’t need a light bulb, I have fire.” - This guy in 1910

The corporate-countercultural purveyor Urban Outfitters sells the ’80s Cell Phone Case($20), a 7.5-by-2.5-inch plastic chassis that chunkily protects fragile iPhones.

Every New York Times trend piece requires at least one implicit or explicit references to “effing hipsters”

Like Dr. Epstein, he holds particular scorn for Angry Birds, which he played once on his fiancée’s phone. “I felt like I lost a half-hour of my life,” Mr. Harig said. “I said, ‘Never again, just take this away from me.’ ”

 Because every phone requires playing Angry Birds for 30 minutes on end. I will assume that since he claims Angry Birds is a waste of time, that he’s never played video games, surfed the web leisurely, or done any non-productive, potentially enjoyable activity ever. 

President Obama has battled allegations by delusional conspiracy theorists who claim that he is secretly foreign/muslin/muslim. He has already shown humor about the absurd allegations, beginning with monetzing the fake controversy by selling merch with his long-form birth certificate on it. 

In this video, the President exposes himself as a birther when he asks a local Hawaiian woman for her birth certificate after she said she was born in Hawaii. 

This is a huge shift for the President, and an even bigger change for birthers, who masked their closet contrarianism to anything the President does behind an even more absurd veil of questioning his policies. I’m sure Orly Taitz’ mind is reeling at this news. 

The most recent NFL and NBA seasons have been huge for fans of projecting culture wars onto individuals who get paid millions of dollars to play a game and stay in shape. Yesterday, former Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow was traded to the NY Jets because they now have Peyton Manning. Tebow must feel hurt that the Broncos would take a broken QB past his prime over a Heisman trophy winning QB who  kind of did better than expected for a few games. 

With Knicks star Jeremy Lin already in NYC, this makes it the holiest town in all of pro sports.

More importantly, Tebow and Lin have the potential to become the dynamic duo of sports memes. After just one season of both in the spotlight, we got the boring “Tebowing” meme and the equally lazy “let’s make everything a pun of Lin” meme.

Hopefully, this tea-up will inspire sports headlines to new heights like, “New York has the Mandate of Heaven.”

George Orwell is losing the likely dystopia battle to Aldous Huxley. The latter’s vision of a world so constantly entertained that it ignores the real societal woes is inching toward a reality. A modern American does not ever have to be bored. 

Anyway, this video scores a small point for Orwell. In this video, a female African-American student freaks out after she asks her teacher why “evolution kills black people.” As soon as her episode begins, a flurry of cell phones leap from the pockets of their owners to record what surely will get “mad likes/comments/reblogs/views.” Another girl even eagerly asks “Are you recording this?” 

This is life in a world where public can quickly become permanent. The video was likely uploaded before the woman in question came to her senses. 

The most chilling moment arrives early in the video, when the woman screams and even dares the voyeuristic crowd to post the video online. If years of reality TV has taught us anything, it is that awareness of a camera changes people. It forces a constant metacognition, wondering not only what one should do at the moment, but what that action will mean to the person on the other end of the cameras, and, ultimately, what the final viewer might think. 

A person doesn’t need to freak out in order to fall victim to our crowd-sourced self-surveillance. It could be as simple as tripping down a stair in a mall or other public place, being recorded, then uploaded before you even get home. 

This isn’t to be a neo-luddite. Some of my best friends are inanimate electronic devices, but it is worth wondering what the constant managing of self-awareness can do to one’s psyche. 

A new report released Tuesday by the US. Geological Society claims that at least hundreds, and up to thousands of expensive clothes and jewelry is routinely buried in mass groups across the country. 

The report’s details claim that the clothes themselves are being stored in expensive boxes prior to being buried about three to six feet underground. 

A team of geologists based out of Boston, Mass., first discovered this while surveying land that was to be used for a new highway expansion. 

“At first, we found a couple, and thought it was a weird local practice, but as we spoke with our colleagues nationwide, we began to piece the picture together,” veteran excavator Dale Evans said. 

Many charities have expressed interest in donating the buried clothes to people who can afford expensive clothes for job interviews or formal events. 

March 16th, 2012 will go down as one of the biggest exposure days in internet history. Earlier, I reported on Mike Daisy being exposed for lying about working conditions at a Chinese factory. Now, Jason Russel, co-founder of Invisible Children, was found publicly masturbating and vandalizing property in San Diego last night. 

Jason Russel, 33,  was allegedly found masturbating in public, vandalizing cars and possibly under the influence of something, according to SDPD. He was detained at the intersection of Ingraham Street and Riviera Road.

Critics around the world are now disgusted, but the big question now is if this literal act of public masturbation was as bad as the “KONY 2012” viral video whose goal was to sell merch featuring a murderous dictator in order to “raise awareness” but not actually “do anything.”

Invisible Children’s CEO released a statement on the situation. 

Jason Russell was unfortunately hospitalized yesterday suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition. He is now receiving medical care and is focused on getting better. The past two weeks have taken a severe emotional toll on all of us, Jason especially, and that toll manifested itself in an unfortunate incident yesterday. Jason’s passion and his work have done so much to help so many, and we are devastated to see him dealing with this personal health issue. We will always love and support Jason, and we ask that you give his entire family privacy during this difficult time.” 

Since the statment mentions exhaustion, it’s pretty safe to say that Jason Russel is on drugs, similar to times when Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan were hospitalized for similar “exhaustion.”

The only other hypothesis is that Russel spent all of his awareness raising awareness, to the point that he lacked the self-awareness to realize that it is not cool to masturbate in public, even if it will get KONY 2012 back in the headlines.

The public radio-sphere is buzzing today with the news that Mike Daisy, an Apple fanboy/hater was EXPOSED after further investigation into his story on This American Life revealed that he fabricated part of his story. Ira Glass posted a retraction on the This American Life website.

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. Onthis week’s episodeofThis American Life,we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and toThis American Lifeproducer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors - our friends and colleagues - have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It’s trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.

 Many people had doubts about the veracity of Daisy’s story, but it took a report by Rob Schmitz of Marketplace.org to uncover what should have been fact checked prior to airing. 

In response, Ira Glass will have a new episode up tonight detailing the falshoods in the original episode, including an interview with Mike Daisy. This situation is similar to what James Frey, author of “A Million Little Pieces” went through after his memoir was revealed to not be entirely true either. Considering that Ira Glass is pretty much the “Oprah of the Liberalsphere”, we can expect him to go similarly as hard on Daisy as Oprah did on Frey. 

Documents taken during the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound reveal plans to kill President Obama and Gen. Petraeus. US. officials said that the plans never really got off the ground. 

But the even bigger news is that Al-Qaeda managed a rare “Triple-pan” in these documents. 

PAN #1

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make (Vice President Joe) Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour … and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

It’s as if OBL’s  view of Biden came from watching SNL and reading The Onion. 

PAN #2

“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” Gadahn wrote. At another point, he said of the networks: “From a professional point of view, they are all on one level — except [Fox News] channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks objectivity, too.”

Fox News has such a poor reputation that one of OBL’s aides did not trust the network to accurately send a Bin Laden 9/11 anniversary tape. This is strange since Fox News was an integral part of the war hype machine that drew us into further intervention in the Middle East, just as OBL wanted. 

PAN #3

“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” Gadahn wrote. At another point, he said of the networks: “From a professional point of view, they are all on one level — except [Fox News] channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks objectivity, too.”

Nobody knows who VOA is, but a quick Google search shows that it is Voice Of America, an international news site for American news. This must infuriate MSNBC, which wasn’t even listed as an organization to be sent to directly. I wonder if NBC would even share such a large story with its cable little brother. 

Congress passed legislation today aimed at buoying independent American content farms through target subsidies. 

“The health of American content farms is paramount,” Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) said at a press conference following its passage. 

The subsidy will support a variety of content farms, from a recently montezied blogspot, to a corporate content farms like Gawker and The Huffington Post. 

Even in the current toxic political climate, this bill enjoyed widespread bipartisan support. 

“Content farming isn’t an issue of picking favorites in business, it’s an issue of national security. Imagine if a celebrity does or says something dumb at an awards show, and a Chinese content farm re-posts it from Entertainment Weekly before Vulture. I don’t want to live in a world where that happens,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said.

AOL Instant Messenger, is essentially a zombie service now. This represents the end of an era kin social media, when AIM dominated internet conversations unless you were one of those weird people who used MSN and probably still has a hotmail account and a gateway computer.

Let’s take time to remember what was so special about our dearlky departed internet instant messenger service. 

AIM thrived in the period of time between everyone getting a computer, but before everyone got a cell phone.n The novelty of an “instant messenger service” can be sen in its name. In 2012, we have instant messaging on so many different platforms that we only acknowledge the speed of said messages if they will be slower than an instant.

Oh, you’re going to send me an email? - snotty retort from a tween in 2012.

AIM also existed between the pseudo-anonymous world of the 90’s internet and the social media explosion of the 2000’s. During the turn of the century, my peers and I used it extensively for private conversations, like “who was dating who?”, “Do you want to play counter-strike?”, and “Isn’t this budget surplus great?” But even with the private conversations, our AIM accounts were open to messages from strangers. Local news networks noticed this, and began beta testing their “social media local news scare piece format” that would later be reheated for Myspace/LiveJournal/Xanga/Facebook/Twitter/Cell phones.

Before Siri, everybody’s favorite replacement for genuine human conversation was SmarterChild. In many ways, he set the groundwork of having a bot stocked with witty responses to the typical questions one asks to an anthropomorphised program.

AIM was my generation’s first major entry into the soon-to-be ever connected world we now live in. Instant messaging through AOL is unnecessary in a world with  unlimited texting cell phone plans and Facebook/Gchat/Skype. Even though it is gone, its legacy is not forgotten. “Blocking” someone turned into “Defriending”, “away messages” into status updates/tweets, complaining about the new AIM into complaining about the new ______.

At the end of the day, AIM will be a fond relic of our tween years, when guys had screennames with Dragon Ball Z characters in the name, and girls had a screenname that was some permutation of “XoSh0rtyS3xiHunni387977”.

The good ole days.

Feel free to comment with your AIM memories. 

As I reported earlier, President Obama is determined to become famous. He has sang twice this year, and now he is venturing into film He must have the same idea of many lost 20-somethings who are using the poor economy as an excuse for “trying to achieve their dreams.”

Anyway, the popular content farm Vulture posted a news blurb from Harvey Weinstein, Chairman of the Weinstein Company. H claims that Obama sent him a book idea and asked if it could be made into a film.

The President sent me a book the other day and said ‘Why don’t you make this into a movie?

Most people would accept the call of the President of the United States of America, but Weinstein panned Obama instead.

In fact, Weinstein claims he turned the President’s pitch down: “I sent him an email back saying he was the most overqualified book scout I’ve ever had,” the movie mogul said

Many question if it is safe to pan a president who has recently signed a bill allowing   indefinite detention of American citizens and has even ordered hits on American citizens. 

Kalamazoo, Mich — Eric Johnson, an 18 year-old from Grand Rapids, has chosen to forgo any meaningful education achievement during his first year of college. Johnson claims that there are already a lot of really good students in college, and that he won’t get any purposeful opportunities to learn until at least his sophomore year. 

“The classes I’m taking now are pretty lame. I have to take remedial algebra because I dropped out of my math class senior year of high school,” the redshirt freshman said between rounds of Modern Warfare 3. 

During most of his classes, Mr. Johnson helps the upperclassmen by scoring poorly on assignments, thus lowering the curve for the entire class.

“I know that the upperclassmen have all paid their dues, so that’s what I’m doing now,” Mr. Johnson said. 

Due to increasing requirements of degree programs and the uncertainty of employment following graduation, many college students across the country have begun redshirting their freshman years for the same reason as Mr. Johnson.

In related news, University of Florida freshman Natasha Morrison took a medical redshirt following an unexpected pregnancy. It is uncertain if she will continue or transfer to a college where she can get more learning time.