the mofo with the info.

I don’t know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J’s keynote, so i’ve transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing… [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That’s why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

We have zero idea what this thing is, if it’s real, or if it’s some kind of factory leak, but this does look a bit promising as the new Dell Dimension B210 that fans have been speculating about for a while now (and yeah, we’re assuming that’s a USB slot at the bottom there). Dell Inc.’s marketing department has yet to confirm or deny the veracity of these leaked pictures, but they certainly look like they are in keeping with the existing Dimension aesthetic that fans have come to recognize. A VERY GOOD SOURCE suggests that these exciting new boxes will ship with 256 MB of DDR SDRAM, a CD/DVD combo drive and a whopping 80 GB Hard Drive!

More details are expected at Dell’s widely expected press event this Thursday, and we will be sure to post more news as it comes to us!

Drawer is a weird word. It’s about the weirdest word I can think of at this moment. The more I look at the word drawer the more and more freaked out I get.

For one thing, there’s the whole pronunciation thing (ugh, “pronunciation” is a weird word too… I’ll have to get back to that later). According to dictionary.com, the correct pronunciation (!) is “drô’ər” or “drôr”, but I’m pretty sure that I say “drōr’ər”. Wiktionary doesn’t even list the pronunciation I seem to use, but it lists several others… of course, that list may have just been created three minutes ago by a crack addict planning on using wiktionary in an elaborate scheme to scam the Russian government. Furthermore, the word has a different pronunciation as “drawers” when referring to underwear. Though I do not personally use this construction, but I am familiar with it, having watched “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”; I recall that Will Smith pronounces it “drôz”, and I defer to The Fresh Prince as an authority on urban matters such as this.

Above all though, drawer is just… one of those words. If you look at the word drawer too often, it becomes unpronouncible (!), incomprehensible, alien. Is there a word for words like that? Words like spies or police that you use every day, but if you flip that switch in your head and just start saying that over and over, you wonder if, the next time you open your mouth, you might be unable to form the syllables that make up the word. You could even be sitting there at your computer, mouthing out the word to yourself, and think “is that really right?”– you’re pretty sure you know what noises to make, but even when you say it out loud, you question if you’ve been saying it that way your whole life, or only now that you think about it? Drawer. Drawer drawer drawer. The whole loop just feeds on itself until the word is to awful, terrible, heavy to even comprehend anymore. Is there a word for words like that? Or, if this is true for all words if you look at them long enough, is there a word for this phenomenon as a whole (ugh, I’m not liking “phenomenon” too much either… or “liking”)? Until I find out the correct word, I’m going to call these words “Schwerwörter” because everything sounds more important in German. Banjax. Banjax to the whole lot of them, I say.

Ö = { all song titles x : | R(x | > 1 }

Where the function R is a function enumerating all songs with that title that totally rock, but are completely unrelated to one another.

Thus,

Ö = {
“Forever Young”,
“Changes”,
“One”,
“Photograph”,
“Push It”
}

NOTE: “It’s My Life” was a close contender… but the Bon Jovi song really only has cheese factor.

The perennial Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is a powerful commentary on the effect of external authority on the social customs of a small population. Though most versions have a lot of unnecessary material at the introduction (particularly the overdrawn Harry Connick Jr. version), the message of the song can be found in the last three stanzas:

All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names
They would never let poor rudolph join in any reindeer games.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say:
“Rudolph with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?

Then all the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, you’ll go down in history.

Though wrapped in jingly bells and drenched in eggnog, this story is actually a grim condemnation of “reindeer games”, or what Nietzsche would refer to as a “slave morality”. Though the reindeer initially shun the mutated Rudolph in order to preserve their social order, a single nod of approval from Santa, their employer and presumably their owner, we are supposed to believe that these formerly vicious cliques suddenly not only accepted the former outcast, but “loved” him. The reindeer are not only content to drag that fat red bastard around like their Sysiphusian weight, they also allow him to dictate their social mores and, one can assume, their sexual selection. Like the horses who affectionately nuzzle the same riders who dig into their underbellies with spurs and whip them with crops, the reindeers have created a morality completely flexible and dependent on the approval of a force outside of their own society. Rudolph is no better than his fellow slaves to external influence; he is unable to defend himself or assert his sexual and social fitness upon his population without the help of an outside influence; even Santa is not swayed by any outstanding personality traits or qualities that might recommend Rudolph as a good reindeer other than the simple mutation that caused his nose to glow.

If the reader then extrapolates beyond the limited lyrics of the childrens’ song, it will quickly become apparent that this kind of behavior describes a mechanism in which the traits exhibited in a limited population can be dramatically changed in response to a non-environmental vector. “Santa” so subtlely influences the impressionable reindeer that Rudolph will necessarily be the prime stud in the next reindeer mating season, and in two or three generations, the mutated red-nose phenotype will be widespread in the limited gene pool. While Santa will no doubt tire of this night-light trick, it will have unforeseen repurcussions on the reindeer population when the clumsy beasts are now easier targets for predators such as polar bears and raptors. As the population of reindeer dwindles in the coming decades, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer will certainly “go down in history” along with the rest of his soon-to-be-extinct race, murdered by their own folly. In this manner Santa poses the problematic role of the malicious or indifferent intelligent designer, who has shaped the formation of a certain culture not to be better adapted for survival, but for his own arbitrary whims.

Whilst IMing a friend, I discovered a huge flaw with the English written language. Wanting to comment on a recent blog post of his, i told him, “I read your blog.” I realized that there were two different meanings for that sentence, usually clearly disambiguated in speech, but in the casual medium of typed communication, the pronunciation was lost, along with any useful meaning. The above statement can mean one of two things, based upon the two tenses of the word “read” which share the same spelling:

1. The past preterite tense: “I read (rěd) your blog” - I happened across your recent post, and am now commenting on it.
2. The simple or repeated present tense: “I read (rēd) your blog” - I watch your blogspot, constantly hitting refresh, straining for some glimmer of information on your opinions, ideas and possibly what you had for lunch. Also, send me a lock of your hair.

The past tense of the verb “to read” is spelled the same as the present tense conjugation “read”. As demonstrated in my simple example above, this is a huge problem that affects IMmers around the world. Er, that speak English. What we need is swift, decisive action to end confusion of this matter once and for all. Luckily, decisive action is what I do best.

To eliminate this ghoti-esque confusion, we should simply change the conjugations of the verb “to read” to match the conjugations of the verb “to lead”. Hereforth I shall now conjugate the past tense of the verb as “red”. There is little chance of a conflict with the color “red” as one is a noun and one is a verb. Other than the slight problem of verbing, the plan is pretty much foolproof.

From tomorrow on out, if you see me online, tell me “I red your blog”. If you tell me “I read your blog”, I’ll have a restraining order on you so fast it will make your hed spin. For those of you keeping score at home, this means, of course, that Red is the new Schmool.

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.

Cupcakes have become an integral part of Manhattan cuisine, growing quickly from “Sex and the City” fad pastry to a staple for a growing number of bakeries, following the success arcs of other such specific dishes as Lobster Rolls and the ubiquitous Corn. New York Metro has a great story on the original Magnolia bakery and the resulting schism between founders Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey , although their version is a little secular for my tastes.

Any real New Yorker knows the true story of La Cupcake Disputà, as immortalized by Raphael Santi in his famous Stanza Della Segnatura frescoes now displayed in the Vatican, and as documented by Milton in his “Aesthetics on Frosting”. Torey, of course, was a strict believer of cupcake-transubstantiation, and that the eucharistic cake and frosting actually became infused with the Real Presence of Jesus’ body and blood at the point of sale; Appel believed that Christ’s body and blood do not come down to inhabit the elements, but that “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space”. The resulting fraction led to the great Cupcake Reformation, by which Appel spun off the Buttercup bakery in midtown and the rest, as they say, is history.
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