email for pics

Some people complain there is nothing to blog about. Some of these people live several stories above this truly blog-worthy gem of amusement:

It’s a brilliant marketing ploy. The Internets have exploded with personal journals of the slightly immature. People who once would just have walked by and snickered can now snicker, take a picture, then plaster the picture on their website so their friends can snicker. Because the joke is less funny if you just crop to the words in question (I mean, anyone can put words on a background then fuzz them a bit), the phone number gets included in the display. So if anyone in the 770 needs something erected, they know where to go.

Interestingly enough, this picture was not taken in the 770. What this piece of equipment was doing five hundred miles away from its native area code is anyone’s guess. I know it’s completely reasonable that Williams just has a suburban Atlanta mobile phone and never bothered to get a local number when he moved, but it’s a little odd. What inspired this man to drag his…whatever that thing is to northern Virginia? Why didn’t he change his phone number? Did he actually change it, but never repainted his erector?

The possibilities are endless. To live fifty yards away from this, have a blog, and complain about the lack of bloggable topics is an insult to bloggers everywhere. Or perhaps just laziness.

Not nearly so entertaining as Dixie’s last.

I recently persuaded my brother to get a flickr account. He does interesting things from time to time and I like seeing about them. Rather than checking some website, or getting emailed pics, I subscribe to an RSS feed of his so-called “photostream” to keep myself up to date with his current happenings. Sweet.

This isn’t a plug for flickr (though flickr does bring to you the amusing header above); it’s a comment on the ease of information distribution in today’s society. It seems the goal is to allow people to be as lazy as possible (it’s recently been pointed out here that a more pleasant term would be “efficient”; I prefer the former). That’s fantastic. But it’ll get better. Mark my words, the day will come when distribution is so robust, people will no longer even have to remember anything. Vast communication networks will allow blindingly fast information retrieval on everything from “which was the president of the United States of America who served non-consecutive terms” to “where did I put my keys”. Chip in your head, people. Chip. In. Your. Head.

Distribution isn’t enough, though. I’m waiting for the day when the internet self organizes and correlates. People then become sensory inputs to a giant, eventually sentient database of the sum (and more) total of all mankind’s knowledge. Gonna be hot. Just you wait.

Cross-posted at Cobweb because I had nothing else to post there for today, and people will howl if I don’t provide content.

Now and again someone will mistakenly ring my mobile. Usually it’s someone expecting to hear Spanish on the other end, and the conversations are brief. Once I exchanged several text messages with a guy who hoped (in vain) to score this person only two area codes away. (In LA, that’s not a great distance.) Last night, however, I had the strangest conversation with a stranger I’ve ever had.

I didn’t mean to sound friendly. I really didn’t. But, you see, I was waiting for a call from my uncle. So when the phone rang in the late evening and I detected a caucasian male voice through the pop and static of appalling reception (T-Mobile seems contractually obligated to leave service holes in places where I live), I cheerily kept the conversation up until I could figure out what was going on.

What was going on, evidently, was that someone was calling for “Simon.” Someone had also sent “Simon” a picture message, which I found out a few minutes later I could access from the T-Mobile website. Apparently “Simon,” a “big black football player from PCC,” had called this nameless individual from this number the night before last and they chatted for 45 minutes. I told the individual that the number had probably been spoofed (and heaven help “Simon” if I find out he hijacked my account and used 45 of my expensive weekday minutes talking to this person). The individual assured me that “Simon” would have no idea how to do such a thing. I bristled at the stereotyping and told him that something fishy had obviously happened, and he might want to entertain the notion that “Simon” could indeed spoof a phone number. I didn’t say, though I did imply, that he might want to ponder why “Simon” had done such a thing.

I know “Simon,” a PCC [American] football player, did not make any phone calls from my phone the night before last because my phone and I were both in West LA. That, and the only numbers in my call log were numbers I knew. Certainly not any calls to these Spokane, WA morons.

The caller changed his tack, and said that since I’d seen pictures of him and his friends, I had to send them a picture. That it was unfair otherwise. I told him he was an idiot and bade him good night. The icing on the cake was when he called for the third time and I let it go to voicemail (the one with my voice on it announcing my phone number and my unwillingness to pick up the phone). The message started with, “Simon. Some chick’s got your phone.”

Astonishing.

I received several more pictures over the course of the evening, none of which were obscene (thankfully). The caller did have poorly done tattoos, which did not endear him to me. He’d have been better off just talking.

A friend commented during this, “Interesting things happen to you.” I told her that it wasn’t really that, it was that my personal curiosity leads me to have conversations with random morons who are trying to reach out and touch someone — anyone they can find — instead of launching four-letter epithets in their direction and breaking the connection. It’s not because I’m lacking contact with my fellow human beings. It’s certainly not because I’m interested in forging a relationship with this individual. It is, pure and simple, curiosity. It’s been getting me in trouble for years, and shows no sign of going away.

The technical literature is full of jargon. It makes people feel smart, special even. The phrase “email for pics” is an example of a specific jargon used by those engaged in online sales. Today, I had the good fortune to see two worlds meet, as an article about revamping one’s website had to introduce the definition of the word “bling”.

Elinor Mills at CNet wrote an article titled “Bring some ‘bling’ to your Web site”, in which some techniques were discussed for making sales-oriented websites more search engine and consumer friendly. Just in case the audience didn’t know what “bling” meant, a suitable definition was provided:

Bling bling is a hip-hop slang term that refers to flashiness or luxury goods.

Priceless. Some words and phrases are simply not meant to be defined in print.

An addendum to the Milk Zeno’s Paradox (or “M’zoop” as its known) known as the (Afro-Eurasian) 4D Caveat.

It has occassionally arisen that too much milk can occur, indicating the impending critical event of ’sour milk explosion’. You may have heard of these, believe me, my friends, sisters best friends boyfriend actually had it happen to him! Where a two gallon jug of milk was left in a fridge over christmas, went off, expanded, ruptured, and turned the entire food storage device into a microcosm of the deepest, most wretched depths of Hell.

So far I have witnessed two near misses, both for very different reasons. The first was while staying with my uncle – there were my uncle, my cousin and myself in residence for the month of August while my aunt and other two cousins were away. Being as we were three men in a house, the fact that the milk order had not been altered or amended lead to a startlingly quick buildup of half pint cartons of milk. By the half-tray in fact.

As everyone knows it is among the cardinal sins to pour milk out because you never know when someone will need it for cereal, or the cat or assorted dairy related activities, so we averted that disaster by replacing a good deal of the water in our diet with milk. For example – Coffee became cafe au lait (milk + instant coffee, nuked). Thus was crisis averted.

However, a far stranger thing happened the summer I stayed at Lake Tahoe – there were eleven of us in a large house with a monstrously huge fridge (by European stanards). We were broke, and so our local Safeways with its ‘two for ones’ was The Place. Point – We all shopped at weekends. Unfortunately one weekend no less that four separate pairs from the house went shopping and spotted the same two-for-one deal on gallons of milk. Milk by the gallon was already a terrifying concept to us, and two gallons of milk for a handful of nickels was beginning to warp our reality.

Imagine then the horror of the last of the shoppers who returned to the Fridge Crypt of the Dwarven Kings and found something akin to eight gallons of milk awaiting their additional two. We all began avoiding the kitchen, and laughing uncomfortably and spending a great deal more time on the deck, or down on the back-yard/prairie, or up a mountain with binoculars on a spur around the lake.

However, it became obvious over time that in fact the milk from Safeways was not going off and in fact appeared to be entirely lacking in a fourth dimension. We had half-and-half, skimmed, semi-skimmed, vitamin-enriched, ordinary (pasteurized, homogenised) UHT and other kinds, bought on spec under the giddy influence of Two-For-One. By the time the house was abandoned some months later only the dregs of the milk and the Immortal Stolen BBQ Beans (food of last resort) remained.

There has been argument over whether this second counts as an example under the 4D Caveat, and there is a school that holds that in fact milk within the United States is exempt from the 4D Caveat – hence the occasionally used “Afro-Eurasian” prefix, noted here for the sake of completeness.

In summary, the 4D Caveat allows one to dispose of milk found in a communal fridge, insuch circumstances as it is believed that there is an imminent risk to the integrity of the fridge, or the foodstuffs of oneself or others and where personal courage (and lack of imagination) is sufficient to overcome the hideous consequences of mishandling the disposal.

I’m going to tread on sacred ground here, discussing issues of such profound importance they are never discussed out loud.
The Rules about eating your roommate’s food:
1. Don’t eat the first one
Maybe the main reason for this is that you have to open the package, thereby leaving evidence of your filching.
2. Don’t eat the last one
If they were saving that last cookie, bagel, beer, etc., they’ll know it’s gone. It’s heart rending to enter the kitchen for a tasty treat only to be forced to endure another bowl of ramen.
Pretty much everything between the first and the last is fair game.

Exceptions:
Cheap beer
There’s nothing sacred about your roommate’s cheap beer, particularly if it’s sitting next to good beer. You’re doing everyone a favor by getting that crap out of the way. Taking the last e.g. Coors Light is praiseworthy because, that crap got skunky, like, a month ago. Dude, way to take one for the team.

Hot pockets
There’s only two in a package. The Rules would imply that you could never steal a roommate’s hot pockets. This is not so. There are several extenuating circumstances to consider:
1. Are there multiple boxes of hot pockets? If so then one hot pocket will not be missed.
2. Are you in hot pocket equilibrium with your roommate? This delicate balance shifts back and forth but, due to lack of record keeping, is largely a matter of perspective.
3. Is your roommate out of town for at least two days? You don’t want those things going bad on you.

Anything else
If you plan on replacing it before your roommate could possibly want it. This can be a particularly effective strategy. For instance, if your roommate has bought deluxe cookies, you can polish them off and then replace them with some crap like Chips Ahoy.

The Milk Zeno’s paradox
The Rules do apply to milk but since milk is, on kitchen length scales, continuous, there is a bit of a problem defining “the last” in relation to milk. With milk and other continuous substances the rule is that you can take half of what’s left. A back-of-envelope calculation shows that if there’s ~100 g of milk left, then, following the rule, you’ve got about 80 uses of milk until you get to the last molecule. Of course, your cereal is going be pretty crunchy with just a single molecule of milk on it. But maybe you should quit whining and go buy some damn milk.

Gosh my local comic book store guy has the bestest idea – invite all his regulars down, surprise them with a wine tasting, then wheel out the experimental vodka, wash down with more wine then have them buy stuff. I have a Looshkin plush doll now. I’m not terribly upset, at absolute worst I’ll just give it to Thing, or Dixie or Fawkes – it is a psychotic looking blue cat, why wouldn’t they love it – and all sorts of comics I’m vaguely interested in.

No correction – comics I am interested in, but just but in a big swedge as opposed to ‘as I’d read them’ which I guess is the point. I did an economics class all about the time differential on money. Anyway 100 quid now is like 105 tomorrow or something. Oh speaking of which I’m supposed to be spendin’ my ill gotten gains on flights to Bristol, I’ve to sort that, nuisance. And go pick up my new credit card from the post office before noon tomorrow. And the rest of the things.

But thats all detail work, mainly I must commend the sales technique of getting your customers all together in one place, then getting them hammered and having a laugh for a couple of hours then they buy stuff. Worked on me.

…all sorts of riffraff will come in. Let this be a lesson.

Blogs are, it appears, something like Lays Potato Chips. You can’t eat just one. This is blog number [mumble mumble] for me because obviously I am not being pointed and laughed at enough. I think this proliferation of blogs is a manifestation of our (meaning the [false] community we’re apparently getting a sense of here) true nature…which is the opposite of lazy.

We enjoy our recliners, we surf the net in what we think is an idle manner, and we sleep until noon because we were up all night the night before debugging something. We play a lot of Freecell. We blog. Some of us blog a lot. (Some of us blog on other people’s blogs.) We spend a lot of time doing things other than work. Does this make us lazy? Hardly, I say. Okay, we might not be producing as much scholarly work as we think we should, but most of us are actually churning out a shocking amount of material in between blogging and trawling Cragslist. Even if we’re not, we’re always doing something. Very few of us can sit still for very long unless we’re doing something (talking, drinking, watching a movie, designing perfectly symmetrical beings, solving Rubik’s Cubes, etc).

We are not lazy people. We have a variety of foci. We may even be misguided. But we are not lazy.

First and foremost, I would like to (re)direct the reader to mda’s inaugural post on this very website. This blog began as a result of analyzing the ubiquitous phrase “email for pics” and all that this phrase may or may not imply about the person who wrote it. One such quality is laziness, and after thinking a little bit more about this, I have decided to write an ode to my most favorite possession…my recliner. Not only does the recliner itself embody the idea of laziness, but it was purchased on Craigslist. A perfect subject for a post on this blog.

My girlfriend, Ariele, bought me this recliner for my birthday a few weeks ago. A white leather, well-worn recliner. I love it. When it comes to kicking back to enjoy a beer, work on the laptop, or watch a DVD, there is no more comfortable place in the whole apartment than my recliner. Like I said, it’s a well-worn recliner, and while that may make its appearance a little less attractive, it’s ability to perfectly conform to the current position of my body has only been enhanced.

With one quick pull of the right hand side lever, the foot rest springs up, but not so quickly as to be startling. The comfy head pillow and armrest cushions are perfectly placed. This heavenly throne has claimed its place in the corner of my living room, lording over the (also white leather and well-worn) sofa and the deadly futon. The sliding door out to the balcony lies directly behind the recliner, so that with a quick adjustment of the wall-length blinds, I can enjoy a perfect amount of sunlight for my reading pleasure.

My recliner is almost the perfect embodiment for this site, emailforpics.com. I, like mda before me, would like to invite each and every one of our friends to register and post such nonsense as I have posted above. Excuses like “I have nothing to say” or “I’m a boring person” or “I would just rather point and laugh at you guys” are not sufficient. We have nothing to say. We are boring people. And pointing and laughing just isn’t nice. Join us and help make the signal-to-noise ratio here on the Net just that much worse than it already is.