Mind Scalpel

I’ve been relatively confident in the likelihood of the United States maintaining its hegemony in the world, not because of the superiority of our military capabilities, but because of the innate corrosiveness of our culture.

You see, America’s international predominance is not based on nukes or aircraft carrier battle groups, both of which are inherently cool and good for impressing the yokels, but rather on these (click here).

Okay, sorry about that, readers who are at work.

Anyway, our secret weapon — so secret that we can spray it out across the world with satellites and yet still not view it as the weaponization of space that it really is — is our mind-numbing, consumerist, degenerate worldview! And I say that as a compliment.

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So how depressing is this? I walk by a Citi (CitiBank? CitiFinancial? Why is an enormous financial institution named with a misspelled word, anyway?) location, and they’ve got these colorful advertisements for their Citi-Online service (an online-banking service), with pictures of people doing various activities and cutesy questions like “Our place? Or yours?”, the implication being that your life would be ever so much more fulfilling if only you could bank anyplace you happened to find yourself.

And what the heck do they mean when they use bank as a verb, anyway? It really makes no sense in this context.

I want very few things from my bank — I want them to pay me for the privilege of holding my vast fortune, to give it to me when I want it, and to give it to whoever else I (and only I!) tell them to. That’s it. So, basically, with a cell phone, I can’t get my money, so the only thing I could be doing with my money is paying bills.

Whee! I can pay bills anywhere!

What’s really setting me off here is one particular ad — a picture of a guy at a beautiful campsite, silhouetted against a fabulous sunset, working — banking? — on a laptop.

How freaking depressing! This is supposed to attract me to your institution? The possibility of being so shackled to my bills and financial life that I’ve got to haul my laptop to a campground?

Now, granted, I’m a high-tech camper. I probably tote more batteries than food when I’m camping. But I’m not hauling stuff to a mountaintop so I can pay my bills.

I know! Let’s advertise more mutually incompatible activities as if they weren’t completely insane!

• Netflix: “Watch our DVDs — while you drive!”
• Nintendo: “Play video games — while you’re mountain biking!”
• Michael’s Craft Stores: “Knit a sweater — scuba diving!”
• Research In Motion: “Check your email on your BlackBerry — while watching your kid’s school play!”

Wait a minute. I see people doing that last one all the time.

Maybe Citi’s on to something….

Alright, I’m getting annoyed with Google again — this time it’s their automated telepathic behavior predictor/installer that’s really sticking it to me.

Think I’m kidding? If you’ve got Google’s search bar, try typing in the beginning of a general question; Google will then activate its mind-reading scanner (embedded in all computer monitors manufactured after 1992) and tell you what the rest of your question should be, in order of the popularity of other people’s questions. And, more often than not, the question that Google asks ends up being a heckuva lot more interesting than the one you started with, so you ditch your old question and start investigating the stuff that Google wants you to. A few examples:

Original Question: How Old Is The Universe?

I got as far as “how old is,” and up popped the following “suggestions”:

• How old is McCain? Coincidentally, the answer to this one is the same as the answer to my original question!
• How old is Hugh Hefner? Hey! I just noticed there’s some old guy puttering around the Playboy Mansion among all those Playmates! How long has he been there?
• How old is Dolly? People actually care about a cloned sheep’s birthday?
• How old is Brett Michaels of Poison? Okay, this officially qualifies as a “WTF?”
• How old is Queen Elizabeth? Apparently kids still have to do history research.

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When you’re dealing with lawyers via email, you will receive messages with threatening disclaimers attached to them. These disclaimers essentially foretell the Apocalypse if you do something normal, like forward the email message to someone else.

Problem is, lawyers have these disclaimers set to automatically append themselves to every email message they send. So they get slapped onto the most innocuous emails you could ever see.

The other day, participating in an email conversation with some friends, I received a “reply all” email from a lawyer friend I’ll call Sam. His only word in the reply was “cool!”

Followed by a lengthy email disclaimer that said something like the following: This electronic mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is privileged, confidential, and/or otherwise protected from disclosure to anyone other than its intended recipient(s). Any dissemination or use of this electronic email or its contents (including any attachments) by persons other than the intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify us immediately by reply email so that we may correct our internal records. Please then delete the original message (including any attachments) in its entirety. Thank you.

As you will have deduced by now, The Mind Scalpel has a bit of a short fuse. So when I received this one-word email message and disclaimer, I snapped. Here is my reply to Sam. I recommend you come up with similar replies if you find yourself in the same situation.

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Michelle Malkin relays a Portfolio story on how Warner Music is spearheading a lobbying push for Congress to require a “music tax” be bundled into your monthly internet service provider fee — supposedly for unlimited access to “a database of all known music.”

Apart from the fact that the phrase “new tax” gets most people in a gun-polishin’, survivalist-cabin-buyin’, Libertarian-votin’ mood, the music industry has apparently completely missed the fact that there’s at least one enormous industry firmly in front of it in line: Pornographers!

You heard that right. Do you really think the first thing the geeks who originally developed the Internet thought, when they were done soldering the last wire in place, was “hey, now I can share music with someone”?

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Okay, this has been bugging me for aeons, and if someone has the time and patience to search for more archived videos of old Gillette shaving advertisements, I’m sure you’ll be able to retire rich off the money you’ll raise from this sure-fire class action lawsuit. For now, I’m avoiding the whole thing, because to research this post I had to search for terms like “shaving” and “video,” and if you’ve ever done something like that you know you’ll get results that would make you want to stick pins into your brain in the hope of destroying the synapses holding those visual memories.

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Years ago, I received some deep wisdom from an extraordinary, modern-day Vietnamese philosopher. Oddly enough, this philosopher appeared on late-night television, surrounded by bikini-clad women, and was aggressively hawking his real estate seminars.

Nevertheless, I learned several important lessons from him, the most prominent among them (for me, at least) being the following (reproduced from memory):

“So I come to the United States, I tell people I want to be rich. They look at me and say ‘You crazy! You poor guy, you poor immigrant, you barely speak English, lots of other people smarter than you, they not rich, how you think you going to get rich? You crazy!’”

“You know what I say to these people? I say ‘You are a loser! Get out of my way! I make it somehow!‘”

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As if more proof were needed of the infallibility of The Mind Scalpel, my previously-articulated thesis that men have an innate instinct to weaponize anything has received even further support by this description of how water-cooler jugs are being used as cannon projectiles.

Sometimes the lonely heart of a Future Global Despot is soothed by the awareness that kindred spirits really are out there somewhere.

Off to figure out how to weaponize a cheesecake….
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I’ve been trying to ignore the insults that Sergey Brin’s throwing at me via his little automated-ridicule-generator (also known as Google AdSense), but I’m beginning to take umbrage at the subjects of the ads appearing most frequently on this blog. A small sample, with comments (and the irony is that by listing these ads, I am driving up the likelihood that they’ll be displayed even more often):

• “Scalp Problems?” — THIS is the best this multi-billion-dollar internet juggernaut can do when confronted by the word “Scalpel”? We’re doomed, I tell you, doomed!
• “Relationship Counseling” — Yeah, I think I’ll get some counseling…ON THE INTERNET. That will work well.
• “Fix Your Marriage” — Doing just fine, thanks! All four of them! So far none of them’s found out about the others!
• “Inside a Boyfriend’s Mind” — Women always say they want to know what men are thinking. Trust me, they don’t. As Larry Miller says, if they did, they’d never stop slapping us.
• “Do Men Want Intimacy?” — Arrgh! No. We want food, big flat-screen televisions, and maybe private jets.

So trust me, Sergey — I’m keeping track, here. You’re on my list for when the Revolution comes, my friend.

But in the meantime, keep those checks coming.

And hey, all you readers — keep clicking on those ads!

Apologies for the short gap in posting. I’ve been thinking about how to respond to a surprising “cease and desist” letter I received last week. Normally, these things shower down upon me like snow in January, to as little effect, but this one was different.

You see, it was signed by a few people whose name I recognized: Bill Gates (yeah, the Microsoft guy — former minion of mine, now in open rebellion, due for a comeuppance, long story), Sergey Brin (Google, same basic siutation), Jeffrey Bezos (CEO of amazon.com) and Pierre Omidyar (EBay dude).

Rather than try to summarize the letter, I’ll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

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