Mind Scalpel

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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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, I admit it. I am torqued. Torqued!

Do you have any idea how much it’s cost me to develop (and, via espionage, steal) my own nuclear weaponry? More than a few peanut butter sandwiches, let me tell you.

And now I see this story, about how we accidentally sent some nuclear warhead fuses to Taiwan. Accidentally! They didn’t even order them! They had asked us for helicopter batteries!

How the hell does this happen? This is worse inventory control than Wal-Mart uses for razor blades, let alone nuclear weaponry, and far worse shipping control than FedEx uses for Christmas gifts.  Is there some vast government warehouse somewhere, jam-packed with both junk and classified weapons technology cluttering the shelves, with some knuckleheaded clerk cruising around on a Segway scooter randomly filling boxes? “Dope-di-dope; well, gee, batteries…batteries…can’t find those…oh heck, let’s toss in some of these doohickeys…they look all electrical-like….” And off the Minuteman missile fuses go to Taiwan.

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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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One thing that I focus on in this blog is the creation of original content. In other words, blogs primarily full of links to other work don’t interest me as much as blogs where more effort goes into them.

Nevertheless, given the emergence of a mini-theme on Mind Scalpel these last few days of the weaponization of everyday things, I could not resist highlighting this story in the <shudder> Boston Globe:

Owner fights off meat thief with frozen ham

March 15, 2008

GLOUCESTER, Mass.—A prosciutto-wielding meat thief in Gloucester met his match when a restaurant owner fought off the assault by slamming the thief’s face with a ham.

Joe Scola of Scola’s Place heard a noise in his restaurant Wednesday, then saw a man fleeing with his arms full of meat from Scola’s freezer.

Scola caught up, and started taking the meat back.

That’s when the man raised a five pound log of frozen prosciutto over his head, presumably to whack Scola.

Luckily, Scola had his own frozen pig product on hand.

He tells the Gloucester Daily Times that he slammed the ham in the man’s face, leaving a gash. The thief was so stunned, he dropped the meat and ran.

Police searched the area, but couldn’t find the suspect.

Possibilities abound, here: “Look out! He’s packing meat!” “We must address the problem of assault prosciutto…”.

Look, we’ve got to face facts here: Most states’ names are either incredibly dorky, completely illogical or downright offensive.

Seriously, I mean, “Rhode Island”? Not an island.

“West Virginia”? No “East Virginia”.

Washington D.C.? There’s a huge freakin’ state all the way on the other side of the continent that everybody confuses with our national capitol.

Okay, technically, D.C.’s not a state, either, but you get my point.

So Something Must Be Done. We’ve got to change those names!

You might think, first of all, that this is just too large a task even to contemplate. I disagree. Prince was able to do it (heck, he went all the way to an unpronounceable symbol just to mess over his record company — you go, [Unpronounceable Symbol]!), and I’ll wager that more people have heard of him than, say, “North Dakota.”

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Apparently the threat of terrorism is like cumin, or chili powder: sprinkle it on an epic screw-up and it makes everything taste a lot better.

Witness what happened recently in Florida, which was plunged briefly back into the Stone Age by rolling power outages. In practically every article about that event, there was a statement that the blackouts did not appear to be caused by terrorism.

Wow! That makes me feel so much better! It’s very comforting to know that, through no intentional act, an entire slice of United States civilization was taken off-line, just by completely random events. We can all rest much easier now.

One gets the feeling that we’ll start seeing news squibs like the following:

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Just checking to see whether the YouTube video embed function I’ve installed is working properly; I might delete this test post if it is or if it isn’t. Do not click on this link unless 1) you know some “l33t speak” (including at the least “ROFLMAO”); 2) you are a fan of World of WarCraft; and 3) you are willing to lose several IQ points (because this vid is just so stupid it’s hilarious, and it will definitely harm your brain).

I figure if enough people watch this video, then my Rapid International Takeover will be that much easier to execute, since there will be far fewer intelligent people left to deal with; in other words, I’m synergistically adding value.

UPDATE:

Look, I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m starting to conclude that it was a serious mistake to post this video link. If you click on it, you’ll think less of me. So don’t click on it.

You still want to click on it, don’t you?

Seriously, don’t. You’ll sit there wondering why the hell you’re watching it, wait for it to get better, and before you know it the whole thing will be done and you’ll be angry about engaging in a colossal waste of time and wondering if there’s someone you can sue to get that 5 minutes of your life back. Since there isn’t, you’ll just get angry at me, flame me and vow never to view this blog again (even though deep inside you know you’ll come back). But all that resentment will just make it harder to recruit you into my Secret Cabal.

So don’t click on it. Please.

You’re going to click on it anyway, aren’t you?

Damn it.

So here it is:

Props to OxHorn.