Author: Aaron Weber

I am so part of the problem.

Every time I think I’m a little too crazy, I come across a story like this one. You know, you could run a simple experiment: If medication makes the voices go away, then they weren’t real. Same with that whole Congolese penis-snatching epidemic.

And every time I think I’m a little too dirty, I come across a story like this one. His lawyer’s argument is that he was just crossing the park to get back to his hotel. But if you’re picked up for “loitering” at 3:45 AM in Central Park with a dildo in your boot, a bag of tina in your pocket, and a rope tied from your cock to your neck, Mary, you are not just taking a shortcut home. But you know what they say: Tina is such a bitch. (Although some people will insist that she’s merely a diva).

Mmmm, apocalicious.

So, there’s this incredibly wonderful fancy industrial-grade coffee maker, The Clover. It costs like ten grand, but that’s not too much more than your standard coffeeshop mega-brewing machine. The difference is that with this one you can program in, cup by cup, exactly the temperature and amount of water and how long it stays in the grounds. It’s become the hot thing among coffee-obsessives, and all the really cool shops were all over them. It got profiles in The New Yorker and Slate and The Atlantic as well as the beverage industry press.

And then Starbucks went and bought the company. And now, as Murketing points out, the cool shops hate them.

It’s not that they suddenly make worse coffee. It’s just that now that Starbucks has it, the excellence isn’t cool anymore: “The saga of its rise, embrace, acquisition and ensuing outcry is a precise, accelerated example of how a well-designed product can become a vessel into which people pour their beliefs, expectations and senses of betrayal; the parallels with Apple run more than just skin deep.”

Now, I understand that independent shops don’t want to be buying machines and supplies and support from their biggest competitor. It’s like Barnes&Noble buying up the book distributors and then using that power to screw the independent bookstores (something which should have been, but was not, blocked by antitrust authorities).

Still: Come on, people. It’s a coffee-maker. It’s not an ethos. It’s not a scene. I can see why cafe-owners would be disappointed, but I don’t see why anyone has any reason to feel betrayed.

I’m beginning to think there are a lot of Massholes on the internet. Why?

Background: Melonie Griffiths-Evans buys a house with a terrible loan: $470,000, no money down, an ARM her broker insists can be refinanced rapidly to something she can afford. She should know better, though, because she’s a realtor. Sure enough, the broker disappears and the company he worked for has since been shut down by the state. And sure enough, Melonie got behind on payments and ended up in foreclosure. Now, the bank owns the house and wants her out of it, but city council and CityLife/VidaUrbana help her stay in the house.

It’s pretty much a field day for internet commentators. Theme one: “You liberal jackasses want to use my money to help idiots,” with a thinly veiled “those idiots are lazy black welfare queens” subtext. Theme two: “You heartless conservatives want helpless poor people to be out on the street,” with a thinly veiled “republicans are all racists” subtext. Theme three: “I rent, and everyone who bought a home they couldn’t afford is an asshole, and I hate them personally.” Theme four: “I blame the Jews.”

The first three at least seem somehow related to the topic at hand, but I’m just not sure where the fourth one comes in. Bizarre.

We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success.

A stork delivers a baby, struggling through waves and storms and deserts, pausing only to fight wolves to make it safely to suburbia, and then is really let down that the baby grows up to be a functionary in a gloomy office. Message: Are you living up to your potential? If not, use our website to find a new job. Oh, crap. Are you crying at an advertisement again? Yeah, that’s always embarrassing.

The ad leaves me with more questions than answers. I mean, is it a good idea to make your potential customers feel really horrible about themselves? Why would the stork stop to fight wolves, when it could just fly around them? Can birds really experience disappointment, and if so, would they communicate that emotion with facial expressions while looking at you through rain-streaked glass? How long do storks live, anyway? Has anyone actually found a job on Monster? (Seriously, as far as I can tell, that website is useful if you are a company that has a candidate to fill a job opening, but needs to pretend to advertise the job to avoid legal troubles.) Ads Of The Weird isn’t convinced it’s a great ad either, especially given the quality of a lot of the jobs on the site.

Oh dear. 3D Printers have learned to self-replicate and NKOTB has reunited. Surely the second coming is at hand! Market self-regulation will make planes fall from the sky and sinners will have to use poorly-designed web pages to figure out what happened. Ol’ John McCain seems to think so, anyway.

On the other hand, given man’s inhumanity to man, maybe a good scourge and tribulation might not be an entirely bad thing.

NewTeeVee says my work-blog at TV With MeeVee is a “corporate blog worth reading.”