Apple Bamboo
We recently hosted a quasi-invited guest. (She sort of invited herself. It was a Thanksgiving kind of thing.) We took this person downtown for shopping, out to dinner and put her up for the night. But this guest wasn’t alone. She was possessed of an uninvited interloper. It was an iPhone.
Introducing the “bamboo” sound.
DA-DA DA-DA DINT DA! Thwap!
The sound was a lot like that coffee commercial jingle only a lot more woody, with a strong, robust finish. It was like Juan Valdez had chugged too much tequila and was getting jiggy on the marimbas.
DA-DA DA-DA DINT DA! Thwap!
That sound haunts me. It chases me in my dreams, where it is the size of the Death Star and I’m running but making no progress. “The rebel base will be in range in 15 minutes.” Only, in this dream, there was no Luke Skywalker to eject a torpedo pulse into a tiny little hole and save the day. The floating space-suited black helmet dudes fired that sucker and blew me and my planet up. And guess what? The sound the Death Star beam made? It was the iPhone bamboo.
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Recycling Recharge #photography
For eight years we’ve tried not to obtain any AA batteries. Instead we got a fancy charger and four sets of batteries to feed (in an eco-friendly way) our power-hungry cameras. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to take masterpiece photographs like the one featured in this very post.
Even so, occasionally we’d fail and still somehow end up buying those piece of shit single-use AAs. I couldn’t bring myself to toss them in the trash so I stuck ’em in a jar on the shelf. The thought of my used up batteries leeching chemicals into the Earth thousands of years after I was gone just didn’t sit right with me.
Over time the collection slowly grew. I tried to put it out of my mind. No place local would take them. I had no clue what to do.
Present Day
Moving day looms large. It’s only three days until I’m supposed to fill that truck. Meanwhile, what to do with my rotting collection of AA carcasses? My choices seem obvious. Pack them and haul them to the new house (even more dead weight up used up possessions) or give up and throw them in the garbage because my body is destroyed from packing and I have no fight left in me.
I guess I could throw them in a fire and roast hotdogs and marshmallows on them. Seems a fitting end. For both of us.
Sometimes the path of giving up and giving in can lead to the ultimate liberation. I should know. I have plenty of experience with both.
Ah, shit. I don’t have the guts to toss ’em in the landfill. I guess they’ll make a nice paperweight in my new office. Till death do us part! Maybe I can be buried with them. “Here lies Tom B. Taker. He’s all charged up about it.”
Tombstone Authoring: A Twitter Experience
Ever wander through a cemetery and wonder about the stories behind those cryptic names and dates? Well wonder no longer. Google, in it’s quest to answer every question of all time, has just announced Google Graveyard. Finally, all of those questions answered.
Some tombstones go old school with name, dates, and that’s it. Some add a few words, like “Beloved Mother.”
Me? I figure what the hell? There’s enough room on my tombstones for 140 characters so why not tweet on it. I plan to make use of that space. Dying will be my final creative act! My pièce de résistance! It’ll even be my raison d’être. Well, maybe not exactly. But you know what I mean.
Towards that end (heh) I set aside a few moments of quality time with my cappuccino and jotted down a few ideas. I’d very much appreciate a tender moment of sharing with you. I’m an author. Please enjoy these selected works from my Twitter stream.
Bonsoir mon ami!
2012-10-05 Tombstone Authoring: ‘The allegations are untrue.’ Signed, Tom B. Taker’s attorney.
Make the great jump if you’d like to read a few more…
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Tell Tiny Tim I won’t be coming home this Christmas
This is the new me. If you see me walking down the street please stop me and say hi! Photo credit: Tyler Rigby.
This is a post about government logic.
Say it with me, won’t you? Government logic.
I know, I know! That’s an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms. FUBAR. SNAFU. Catch-22. Topsy turvy. The inside-out enchilada. The 2-1/2 double-reverse antithesis with a twist. In essence, it’s shit that doesn’t make sense – can’t make sense – and the understatement of, oh, I don’t know – the last 42.42 trillion years. And I never exaggerate.
Humor me for a moment, won’t you?
So get this. An attorney representing the United States of America stood before the Supreme Court and argued that since the operators of motor vehicles have no expectation of privacy while on publicly-owned roads that, therefore, the federal government should be allowed to plant GPS devices on cars without a search warrant signed by a judge.
Ever want to know what the federal government really wants? Well, there ya go. There it sits! This is the kind of shit that the government thinks is a good idea. So good, in fact, that they are willing to spend resources, time and your tax dollars working on shit like this.
Would it be a great crime-fighting tool? Perhaps. Stop terrorism dead in its tracks? Erm. Probably not. You know, it’s one of those slippery slopes that generally goes like this: If you outlaw cars without GPS then only outlaws will have no GPS.
Or something like that.
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Shouts from the Abyss 
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