So I’m at the Nvidia campus today to check out the new GPU whatchajiggers that are going to change the face of computing … and I’m under strict NDA, but these thingamobs are pretty ace widgetry, to be honest. No problem there.
And that’s not the story. The story is that part of the day was a series of breakaway sessions that involved heavy petting with the likes of the Weta Digital crew that made Avatar, and some Euro company that jacks up the Ferrari customer experience via online ray traced bread and circuses, and Adobe, which many of you may know as makers of expensive licensed shite that you use to fuck around with pixels on computers.
That last company is important, as it is the subject of the current story. And more specifically, the Adobe mouthpiece who delivered said story and in doing so, made me hate Adobe more than I already do as a dedicated hater of things that make other people happy and/or money and/or what’s the diff?
What follows is a lesson for marketers and PR types in how NOT to engage your audience if you have pre-determined that it possesses a fraction of a brain collectively.
1. Do not open your preso by declaring that your latest product (about which few in attendance give a crap) is a ‘game-changer’. That will be determined by readily available statistics later. And it’s a terrible cliche.
2. Do not ask the reporters in the room if they have heard about your latest product (CS5 in this case, if you must know) and what they think about it. People do not like to be put on the spot when all they are expecting from you is free coffee and some corporate swag. People who can later rip you a new one from bully pulpits are particularly the sorts of people you do not want to engage in this manner.
3. Finally, and most importantly, do not brag that your company has had a hand in literally *everything* your audience has ever touched. This was actually said by Adobe’s agent at today’s event. And in the sterile modern setting of Nvidia’s headquarters, it made a sort of sense. All of the labels and signage and iconography on all of the many very new things that surrounded us were *probably* realized in some way via an Adobe image manipulation product.
But to say, as the Adobe person did, that ‘it’s so totally great to work for a company that has had a hand in EVERYTHING you encounter in life’ (her example: the Cokes we were drinking at the time), is to make any reasonable person who knows about pine cones and asphalt and human artifacts fashioned before 1990 very, very angry and resentful indeed. And very possibly dismissive of everything useful you might have to say following that outburst of transparent evangelism.
So let that be a lesson to you, corporate marketers. Treat the (however borderline) intelligence of grumpy assholes who can later write about you with at least a modicum of respect.
The summer after 5th grade, we got that book out from the library. We read it excitedly through our horn-rimmed Dexter glasses while listening nonstop to Perry Como’s Como Comes Alive.
So the Democrats have…
This is going to be something that reflects poorly on them, we can just tell.
So the Democrats have finally admitted they will not produce a budget plan this year. This is the ultimate in political cowardice. To understand how cowardly, one must understand what a budget plan really is.
A plan. A plan for a budget? This is when you plan to make a budget, or is a plan that is made on a budget. That’s infinity cowardly.
Well, glad we cleared that up. The penultimate in political cowardice is probably triple or dipple infinity.
In short, a budget is an outline, a roadmap, a guide for future spending and revenues. It does not actually spend anything or take any money in itself. It’s just a blueprint.
So in long, it’s just a budget plan. But in short, it’s a blueprint plus hummana-hummana-hummana-wordity-yakkity-bla.
One thing is for certain. Here we find the true and factual statement that when you make a budget, it does not go straight out the door and get in your car and start the engine, then release the parking brake and put the car in drive, driving thus to and fro, stopping hither and thither, flouncing and pouncing both higgledy and piggledy, over dale no less than hill — to spend or take all your money in itself, or any other elf, let alone all its ilk. That’s what a budget doesn’t do.
Dude, I just frickin’ asked you to let those ilk alone.
Aah, well, that joke worked in theory. Back to Erick:
Think of how you do your family budget. You may budget to spend $100 a week on food, $40 a week on gas, and $20 a week on entertainment. Big categories.
As opposed to trifles like shelter and medical care.
You don’t have to budget for Cheerios versus eggs, or regular versus super unleaded, or movie night versus mini-golf. Those detailed decisions come later, as you go along in life.
We’ve just found out why Erick’s soufflés don’t always come off well, his car runs lousy, and he can only get a few minutes into Braveheart each time before being asked to pick up his recliner and ottoman and move out of the way of the #7-hole putt-putt prairie dog jamboree.
But the family budget sets the parameters for big categories of future spending.
The ultimate parameters are one of the most unique, um, criterion of phenomena.
No, seriously. You budget big categories like food, but detailed decisions like Cheerios versus eggs comes later in life — and this is what sets the parameters for big categories of future spending?
A hot wind blows your hat off, and the Speedball Express comes roaring past on the Chattahoochee-to-Wichita run, snagging a canvas mailbag as it whooshes into the live-rock tunnel under the foothills of Old Baldy. Inside that mailbag was my brain.
The same is true for a budget resolution in Washington. It sets the parameters for big categories of spending—say, “transportation” or “international affairs.” The details of which dollars go where come later in the appropriations bills, tax bills, or direct spending bills.
In other words, a budget resolution is the most basic fiscal legislation that Washington can produce. And get this: it’s not even binding! A budget resolution does not go to the President for signature and thus does not have the force of law.
As Wikipedia explains: “A budget resolution, which is one form of a concurrent resolution, binds Congress, but is not a law, and so does not require the President’s signature.” Huh. So Erick can hike stuff, and all he has to do is change the wording and make facts wrong? Sweet.
The budget resolution serves as a blueprint for the actual…
A blueprint, yes. Welp, let’s take the cap off this 1.5-liter bottle of cheap gin. [dook-dook-dook-dook] Ahhh, shmooth. [sound of body falling to floor]
So let’s recap: the Democrats have just admitted that they are not able to pass the most basic, almost simplistic fiscal outline that’s not even binding anyway.
Re-uncap tha damn bottle, ya big red [hic!] galoot…
Notes:
* Began as a pun on ‘budget,’ wandered, lost narrative. 1 Wants a picture of that outlaw menace Spider Man for the evening edition.
How many Clintons does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one, but there aren’t many interns who nickname their pussy ‘light bulb’! Zing! Zam! I’m here all week! Try the veal!
On this day in history, that first sentence could be the one that’s the most dense-packed with stupid of all sentences in an Erickson post, and therefore, until proven otherwise, in all of human discourse. “Continue to screw consumers with laws against business” is almost beautiful. It’s a stark, unadorned construction of ideas that required literally decades of work by the postwar right, first in the building of institutions and infrastructure,2 then in releasing payload after payload of bad-faith claims and contorted analyses into the atmosphere, until at last, a sufficient degree of besozzlement was realized that a sensible moderate-income American might expect to encounter such a phrase outside of the nearly plotless string of laugh-lines that make up a Sinclair Lewis novel.
For here is George Babbitt at the breakfast table reading the newspaper: “Why, here’s another thing. They continue to screw consumers with laws against business.”
Here’s Babbitt again, down at the Elks Club with the gents:
Well, banks have been giving free checking accounts, but then charging irresponsible check holders overdraft fees for drawing more money out their accounts than is there.
“How’s that again, Georgie?” said Vergil Gunch, Zenith’s biggest coal dealer.
In other words, only the spendthrifts pay.
The almost-beauty of Erickson’s word-sculpture, and I’ll repeat it: “continue to screw consumers with laws against business,” is that anybody with a lick of, and I quote again: “basic economic sense,” knows that consumers and business are inherently, tautologically, by the nature of what ‘consumers’ and ‘business’ are, opposed in their basic interests. For example, buyers want low prices, while sellers want high prices.
In a larger sense, the great project of the right in America since the reaction against Jacksonianism, or fundamentally since Hamilton, has been to advance the interests of the propertied and wealthy, the employers and sellers, in a system set up to respond to the will of the majority, who necessarily will mostly be employees and buyers.
This is not possible to achieve except by fooling the majority that their interests are different from what they are, manipulating them to exert their political power in various foibles and whoopsies: to shoot wealth away in a circus cannon; to be maneuvered into quarrels with the Blacksons next door and the Juanses around back; to put the car in gear and have the garage door pulled off by a sneaky chain, and that night to have the car driven off skidding and beeping from the wide-open garage; to find clowns switching your water and sewer lines, then run out to have other clowns switch the sewer and gas, then run in and someone flushes the john and blows out all the windows, then run out as clowns enter through the windows, then run back in, etc.
But Congress now says banks cannot charge overdraft fees without first getting the consumer’s permission. Fat chance that will happen. So banks are going to start charging fees merely to have a checking account.
Hey buddy, tough chance, fat luck. Congress says clowns can’t rifle through your pockets without permission. Who’ll give permission!? So clowns are banned from your pockets! That’s how you just got screwed.
Where will you get your negative clown money now that your pockets have lost the guaranteed right to have clowns in them?
No, I mean WTF!?
This is not an unintended consequence. This was quite foreseeable except to Democrats.
Democrats did this thing, and it was not unintended, and it was quite foreseeable, except to Democrats.
There is a small, round figure standing on the moon-slatted sidewalk down by the corner, under the sign that says “bus stop.” It is holding a little suitcase with a little shirttail sticking out of it. That is my brain.
2 Actually, ‘first’ for the right was to delouse from Fascism. Among the forgotten sagas of the American right is a funny culture war between American admirers of British civilization, and American admirers of Germanic civilization, that was first bruited this way and that way in the years leading up to WWI, but that broke out with rancorous oompah and bagpipe in the ’30s, as a proxy battle between groups that could without great imprecision have been termed as ‘not Nazis’ and ‘Nazis.’ In the latter category was much of the right, while another large portion of the right still imagined the future through the corporatism of Mussolini. The distinction was chiefly in which arrangement was seen as the better way to combat Bolshevism. The delousing lasted roughly until Russell Kirk.
Obama believes in the rule of law — his law. No other law is relevant. No other law matters.
‘But no president can reason,’ we objected.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Lamb, ‘there is one that can.’
When Obama speaks, he expects the world to obey.
In his Tuesday night performance, he said ‘I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business …’ ‘Inform him?’ Where does Barack Hussein Obama get the authority to issue orders to the CEO of a private corporation?
From his bloodthirsty pagan Moon God?
There is no such authority in the Constitution. There is no law that empowers the president to ‘inform’ the CEO of any corporation how he will spend the corporation’s money. Obama couldn’t care less about the Constitution or the law.
There was no Constitutional authority for him to essentially take over General Motors and Chrysler, or the banks. Obama couldn’t care less about the law. When he speaks, he expects the world to obey.
Don’t believe it? Why just the other day, Lamb overheard this telling exchange between Obama and the world:
Obama: Honey?
World: What?
Obama: Where’s my super suit?
World: What?
Obama: Where … is … my … super … suit?
World: I, uh, put it away.
[A helicopter explodes outside]
Obama: WHERE?
World: WHY do you NEED to know?
Obama: I need it!
[Obama rummages through another room in the White House]
World: Uh-uh! Don’t you think about running off doing no derrin’-do. We have been PLANNING this dinner for two months!
Obama: The public is in danger!
World: My evening’s in danger!
Obama: You tell me where my suit is, woman! We are talking about the greater good!
World: ‘Greater good?’ I am your wife! I’m the greatest GOOD you are ever gonna get!
You go, World! But we digress and thankfully, Lamb will no longer be silent, Clarice:
Obama can’t comprehend any limitations on his power. The moment Arizona enacted a law that empowered state law enforcement officers to check for citizenship, Obama bad-mouthed the state legislature and Governor — without even reading the law. There have been arrogant presidents before, but none that can compare to the sickening self-centered narcissism that exudes from this man.
We heard Obama replaced that bust of Winston Churchill with a sculpture of himself. Covered in a mirror. That has a string that you can pull and it says, ‘I complete me.’
Obama’s declaration that America must end its addiction to oil misses the point entirely. America is not addicted to oil at all; America is addicted to the life-style made possible by the most efficient, abundant energy source yet discovered.
You say I’m addicted to Vicodin. Hey jackass, what I’m addicted to is the sweet embrace of numbness made possible by the most abundant pad of blank scripts yet discovered (by my brother-in-law in the trash containers behind the VA clinic last Tuesday). To-may-to, to-mah-to.
In a capitalist society such as America, government’s role in the market is limited to providing a level playing field for the entrepreneurs who risk their own assets to provide a product or service in hopes of making a profit.
Which is why Obama has NO BUSINESS meddling with what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a body of water and clearly not a playing field. Except maybe for yachts or speedboats, but still.
The reason the nation has not switched to solar or wind, or other alternative energy sources has nothing to do with our addiction to oil; it has everything to do with cost and convenience.
Ah, yes, those old conservative maxims: ‘No pain, gain’ … ‘Let’s take the easy way out’ … ‘Put a little elbow grease into it — sorry, did I say “elbow”? I meant “bacon” …’
Obama has decided that cost is irrelevant. He wants to wean America from oil and bond the nation to exotic alternatives, regardless of the cost. When Obama speaks, he expects people to obey.
Okay, we get it already, Lamb. Obama’s a liberal fascist martinet hellbent on destroying America, blah blah blah. Why don’t you say something really fucking crazy?
He is ready to artificially and unnecessarily increase the cost of carbon fuels in the form of taxes and fees, in order to fund subsidies for wind and solar energy sources. It doesn’t matter to Obama that the environmental disaster that will be created by the solar farms and wind farms is much greater than the Gulf oil spill.
From the daily list of recommended reads at America’s Shittiest Website™, we have this:
Of course, this headline simply writes its own rejoinder: who knew that teenage boys could get pregnant? Rimshot. Thank you. I’m here until Sunday. Try the steamship round.
K-Lo brings home her Father’s Day celebration at ASW™ by taking a swipe at single moms and complaining bitterly that Obama dared to mention in his Father’s Day message that even families without fathers (like his own growing up) have value too. Oddly, notwithstanding her almost creepy obsession with Father’s Day, K-Lo doesn’t say a word about her own father. Not one. Issues, anyone?
And here’s my belated thought for Father’s Day: Let us all be truly thankful that, despite Rush Limbaugh’s four serial marriages, none of his little swimmers have had the energy to make it all the way up the canal to produce any little Rushbos. Thank you, Lord. Some things even Viagra won’t help.
How ’bout this: ‘No one may run for President of the United States after previously only being elected to a state legislature and U.S. Senate with no chief executive experience.’
But if you were previously only elected to a state legislature but not the U.S. Senate, presumably it’s cool to run for President.
Some questions have answers that are just too obvious:
“Why did they make another Shrek movie?” one of my children asked me as we bought tickets to see it, and I suspect it was at least partly a rhetorical question.
