Rhymes With Fuck

Lately I’ve got my face cleansing regimen on lock. It took a lot of experimentation, but I figured out the right soap(s), the right frequency, when to shave, correct water temperature for both washing and rinsing (it matters, oath). And cetera. My naturally radiant skin is so fresh now that if we were talking on a mountainside you’d probably see Moses and Elijah by my sides holding me down.

My cuffs may be bone dry, but alas my feet are soaked: Although you’d never tell by looking, sometimes, at night before bed, my face feels a little dry. Fuck. So now what, I’m in the market for a moisturizer? That could throw off my facial game! Who knows how my precious skin will react to new chemicals, or how long it’d take to find the right one. It’d be a whole thing, and who has time for things in this economy.

I wanted to learn about moisturizing until I happened upon a piece of half-remembered third-hand anecdotal information that changed everything. You know how your skin is just one big organ? Well, according to this definitely-not-bullshit thing I heard, this means your skin will share moisture throughout itself, kind of like how your whole circulatory system shares your blood, or how both kidneys are full of piss-treating software. It is undeniably one organ, after all. So maybe that just means, I don’t know, my hands or knees or something are too dry and they’re pulling key moisture reserves from my beautiful cheeks, like when you’re cold and your body limits blood flow to your tootsies. If I fixed that problem I wouldn’t need to upset my routine. It all makes sense.

Except that when something just “makes sense” it’s probably gonna be bullshit. Turns out that shit “makes sense” cause we don’t know anything about most things. Like oh, Marco Polo brought back pasta from China, that’s why lo mein and spaghetti are the same thing. Water drains the opposite way in Southern Hemisphere toilets like how ocean currents go opposite ways. If you drop a penny off the Empire State Building it’ll kill someone. Eat five small meals a day or your body will go into conservation mode.

But what the fuck do you know about Marco Polo really? Or fluid dynamics? How fast does a penny have to be going to cave in your brain case? I used to believe all this stuff too, cause I was told it by equally dumb adults/teachers. You hear fancy words like “Coriolis effect” and “terminal velocity” and well, I’ve never written a research paper about pasta and there IS some spaghetti-lookin shit in China. I like both versions with extra mushrooms. So… makes sense. 

I’ve heard the train analogy used a hundred times talking about meal frequency: if you don’t feed the fire (your metabolism) regularly (every few hours), it (you) shuts down (your body is very similar to a coal-fed locomotive). That makes sense cause it reduces a topic we have absolutely no expertise with to a story about a choo-choo train. Why would your body to slash and burn metabolic processes the second it doesn’t get food? How does it benefit us evolutionarily if we have OD yawn times right away so it’s harder to catch our next meal? That’s an awfully small window to do any serious hunting/gathering in before it turns into a two-nap day.

On the other hand it’s obvious that your hair and fingernails continue to grow after you die cause they still have food and energy stored up. It’s not like every cell immediately dies when your heart stops beating, that’s why they can do organ transplants. Or something close to that. Those hair cells never really gave a fuck about what I thought or I wouldn’t need to shave so often. So now that the  brain’s not around to judge them, of course they’re gonna plow ahead until they run out of juice. 

That one made sense to me up until a few weeks ago, because I’m an idiot who knows nothing about biology. I was so excited to jump on that “skin’s just one big organ maaaaan” bandwagon. It’s extra easy to buy into silly myths about our bodies.  I’ve had one my whole life so I must be an expert, I should be able to tell fact from fiction. I’m sure I still believe in tons of stuff like this. 

Anyway, back on topic, someone let me know about that moisturizer shit and if it’s for real (still hoping), or hook me up with any ancillary info I might need to make an informed decision about what kind of cream I should buy to most benefit my punam. 

“I’m an adult film actor. Yeah, a porn star I guess… though I don’t like to call it that. Makes it sound so commercial. Most of it is, you know? And most of the people get into it for that? The money, the recognition. Awards. I just say whatever to all that stuff. I’m a part of this industry because I love it. I know you don’t hear this all that often, but I got into erotic talkies because I was fan the craft.

“Ever since I was a little kid and I discovered Internet, I’ve been a student of the artform. I mean most men around my age would probably say the same. But you know, they were probably more about gratification? Like, physically. I get that, and I guess I can respect it, however puerile that is. Me, though? I hardly ever even looked at my dick for the first few years. I was just so enthralled by the artistic nature of human intercourse filmed for mass consumption. It was… beautiful.

“And I mean, I’m like way into the history, the porno context. Heh, it’s actually funny. People were such savages back then. Wild, uncontrolled body hair, cheesy music that was way too hot in the mix, horrendous editing. Some studios would even wipe between shots in the same scene! I know right! It’s charming to look at now in an anthropological way, but totally embarrassing in retrospect. None of those people could sniff a job in the industry today on their own merits, and it can’t all be blamed on the increasingly unrealistic standard for female beauty, you know. 

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Personally I’m like way into anal. That aspect of P-in-V cinema was just gaining a hold when I got on board. Those monsters I was just talking about before would never even give your butt hole a second look. Not that you’d want them to or anything haha, I just mean you know. Sorry. I’m kind of an anallingus nerd though, I think about it all the time. It’s my favorite part of any shoot. 

“People think they don’t have to pay attention to it because the orgasm parts aren’t in there. But you know what they’re wrong. I think so, anyway. It can add another layer of depth and complexity to an otherwise boring scene. There’s really a lot to think about when you get right down to it: camera and leg position, seated or standing… how much saliva? How many fingers? Do we bring any foreign objects into the equation? Ha I see that look you’re giving me but trust me, I’m a very intuitive ass eater. I know what a woman’s ready for and when she’s ready to have her boundaries explored a bit. I call it ‘tushing the limit.’ Ha I don’t really but you know.

“Yeah so look I’m shooting a scene tomorrow and I’d love for you to come -er, drop by, see how I work. Maybe see if you like what I do, ha. Oh, my name is Seymour, by the way.”

Warning: this shit ain’t that funny. It’s kinda funny cause I’m inherently funny, but it’s mainly not funny. You might want to skip it if you aren’t a big dumb comedy nerd.

I think about comedy a lot. Most of the things I think about were inspired by stuff Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut have said about humor, somewhere. The Salmon of Doubt maybe, I forget. It used to mystify me why comedy wasn’t taken seriously at all, let alone in comparison to things considered higbrow like music, drama, painting, etc. But I think I figured out some of the fundamental reasons why that I’ve never seen talked about.

To start, I think comedy’s an art form. Mainly because I’d like everyone to think of me as an artist. A lot of people would probably agree, but they’d also relegate almost every form of humor to the art minor leagues. Every now and then a piece of humor is so amazing it’s undeniable, like Catch 22, so we call it satire and let it into the Pantheon of Art, but mostly it can be written off as a cute distraction. Comedy is the curling of the artistic world. Fun to watch sometimes, maybe nice to have on in the background, and a lot of the ladies who are good at it are cute as heck, but only a tiny fraction of the world would dream of calling it great. Even a lot of the participants must put it down (you’d have to, right? it’s one of the least interesting things that can be done on ice). 

I think one of the main reasons it’s hard to see comedy as highbrow because while the most erudite humorist will make you laugh, someone farting loudly in a library by accident also makes you laugh, or an inappropriate thought at a funeral gives you the giggles. Not a lot of stuff people consider cultured or artistic can be mimicked unintentionally like humor can. Listening to a really moving piece of music evokes a physical/emotional reaction you’re not likely to get when you hear a child sing a (probably dumb) song they made up. Reading a brilliantly crafted biographical article about a Civil War soldier might lead you to insights you wouldn’t have otherwise had, but that’s not gonna happen via a series of drunk texts. Amazing art can move you to tears, but accidental/trite/unskillful art can’t. Unfortunately, it’s different for laughter.

Laughter, internal or external, isn’t always on purpose, or introspective, or even understood, so the amount of effort comedians/humor writers/comic actors put into their craft isn’t always obvious from your reaction. Everyone in the world makes others laugh sometimes. Even though comedians can manufacture these amazing tricks seemingly at will, you’ll find a lot more “oh anyone can do that,” “that was just luck that they had that idea,” “they’re not doing anything original or groundbreaking” type reactions than you would (if that exists at all) in any other artform.  

Laughing isn’t nearly the same as crying or the anxiety you might feel at a tense moment. It takes a lot of time and investment for someone to be moved in those ways. Hell, we have a whole sector of our nervous system dedicated to making sure we don’t get upset enough to cry and calming us down if we’re anxious. Laughter, though, is ephemeral and immediate, and doesn’t hang around the pit of your stomach like a terribly sad story might. Usually you only cry at the climax of a story or a particularly moving bit of music or whatever, but you’re supposed to laugh again and again throughout the entirety of a comedic work if it’s any good. It becomes commonplace. 

Something that made you laugh can be cerebral and cultured, but it rarely sticks to your skull like a work that just makes you think. When you come out of a play or symphony or some other dumb shit, you and whoever you saw it with might discuss the themes or structure or pacing; when you see a particularly evocative painting or brilliantly directed movie, you’ll talk about the use of color and angles and movement. Talking it out and getting a different perspective helps you understand it more.

But with almost any type of comedy, you’re just going to quote the funniest lines at each other. We hardly ever spend any time contemplating the things that make us laugh (unless you’re trying to make a living off doing it) because we got the whole experience, didn’t we? That’s what it feels like a lot of the time, anyway: I saw it, I read it, I heard it, I laughed. It did it’s job, done. All that traditionally highbrow stuff is there to be talked about, but almost nobody does because comedy’s so immediate and transient; more like a pickpocket than Ocean’s 11/12/13. 

You can find about 5 years worth of podcast content where people discuss practicing comedy and complaining that it’s not treated the same as drama when Oscar nominations roll out, but hardly anyone addresses the “why,” and as far as I can tell, nobody at all has ever discussed the fundamental reasons that it might be nearly impossible to. And I’m not interested in answering why or if you should consider comedy “important” or “high brow,” I just know that I do. Hopefully this’ll help you think about humor differently. 

Cord Elves are an improperly-named tiny race of gnomes. They can move at the speed of light and their hands work twice as fast in a grave insult to Einstein. Cord Elves like to sneak into your home go to work tangling up all your cords. Examples of cords they may tangle are computer, audio/visual, console, belt, telephonic, bungee. It gives them immense joy whenever they hear you futzing around with knots and say something like, “Jesus Christ these chargers have just been sitting in a drawer for months, how did this happen?!” And do you know why? It’s because they’re grade-a pills.

Just seeing that picture gives me anxiety. I get to the point sometimes where I just want to throw everything into the trash and move to the mountains alone on some Walden shit. Except that I’d definitely die cause I’ve never gone a single day without at least two of the Big Three (plumbing, electricity, internal combustion).

Look. These things have to exist. If they don’t, that means it’s somehow my fault whenever my things get tangled up. Honestly, I’m just not at a place in my life right now where I can accept that responsibility. I feel like a monkey throwing a bone at some big black rock when I try to work out just what the fuck happened. How many times have you plugged a peripheral into your laptop and set it down only to come back seconds later to a 5 minute chore? Almost never, but if you exaggerate how much time things take then probably a lot. Maybe always.

I don’t want to hear some nerd say jargon-loaded science at me about tangled states and matrices and statistical modeling. Fuck science + math. Just work on getting photographic evidence of the goddamned things so it turns out I’m not crazy retroactively. Once we identify the enemy we can get to work putting a stop to their tyranny of annoyance. Perhaps it’s possible to train them to weave rope or barbed wire? If they’re cute we can even keep them as pets, I don’t know. I’m open to suggestion.

Like most made-up things from folklore, their strength is their undoing. These cord elves are fantastic at the tangling up of things (that’s a trainwreck of a phrase), so how can that be used against them? I’m actually really awful at puzzles and mysteries like this. If I were in Resident-Evil times without infinite continues I wouldn’t have made it out of that first room after Barry finds some blood. There’s only one thing I’ve worked out that is a foolproof defense against these pieces of shit, and it was by accident. If you played video games as a kid, then you probably have too.

That’s right: pre-determined, organizational tangling. These little motherfuckers think they’re such hot shit but they can only do, they can’t undo. You wrap your shit up good and neat and shit stays that way as long as you don’t jostle it around too much. Maybe you’ll find a mass ritual suicide in your basement of these gnome ass gnomes. God, I can only hope. They can probably tangle up a noose real good.

This dude that jerk offs in Philadelphia like to call R. Diddy (seriously) went and said some really dumb shit lately (see above). It’s an asinine comment from an otherwise decent sports journalist. I have a hard time telling if a comment was said because someone actually believes it or they just want to get more hits sometimes, so maybe Ray doesn’t really believe this stupid pablum, but I know a lot of people do so I’ll just treat it that way.

Here’s a note to every genius: the sample size on superbowl winning QBs is under 30 which makes any broad statement about what’s needed to win a superbowl meaningless. Tom Brady’s a great case. There’s a bulletproof argument to be made - both statistically and by the dumb-as-shit “eye test” - that the Tom Brady who won three superbowls is a different quarterback than the Tom Brady who’s lost two. He’s become much more efficient and accurate than he was in 2004 and hasn’t won a superbowl since developing those skills. Nobody in their right mind would say “a guy who develops much better passing statistics late into his career can’t win a superbowl,” but that’s exactly what’s happened. ERGOT, there’s as much quality evidence to back up that logically appalling argument as the one Ray made.

It gets worse when you consider that QBs you wouldn’t be embarrassed to compare to Mike Vick have only been in the league for what, 15 years? 15 chances for a “type” of quarterback that you probably racistly decided to lump together ain’t really much of shit when you consider Dan Marino had 17 gos. Jim Kelly had 10. Favre only won once, and he had even longer. 31+ starting quarterbacks don’t win a superbowl in any given year, and when Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson have it’s OD silly to try and gerrymander an argument that includes those guys but excludes Michael Vick.  

The most bullshit thing about this argument is that Vick has become much more of a “pocket passer” (code for “white quarterback”) than he ever was. He’s standing in the pocket longer, doesn’t always look to run as soon as he feels pressure, and is completing >5% more passes over the last two years than he ever has in his entire career. Just because he can also still run doesn’t mean jack dick. Show me what quarterback did better with an NFL-record five defensive collapses after leading in the fourth quarter. And if you want to blame their playoff loss to the Packers last year on him, then sorry but FUCK YOURSELF!!!!

The boring, unfunny, and obvious reality that doesn’t get any sports talk website hits or linkbacks in the blogosphere (thank heavens I don’t want any of that stuff!) is that football is a team sport, and winning a championship requires a lot more luck than we’d care to admit. The Crying Harbaughs are testament to that fact after the 2011 season. They probably should have been playing this Sunday, but a couple fluke plays/non-challenges meant we got to see dopeyface beat the pants off of Tom “Only Puts It In 10s” Brady again, which sucked. Save us, Cam Newton.

And another thing:

Eli Manning isn’t “elite” just because he had one very good aberration of a season that included no less than three (3) losses you can blame solely on him. He had a very good year and won the superbowl, but that would mean Victor Cruz is elite, too. If you want to rewrite the definition of “elite” to include Eli “fuck this dude” Manning’s statistical blip this year, you’re also going to have to include Matthew Stafford, Tony Romo, Philip Rivers, and probably Matt Schaub who all had/have had comparable and better seasons.

But when you umbrella “elite” out to cover a full 25% of potential starting quarterbacks, it renders the term meaningless to anyone other than New York newspaper headline writers. That’s why we don’t consider Big Rapey Ben elite even though he’s got the same number of rings and better career stats than Eli. Even if you think Eli’s year wasn’t an accident, he still needs to keep it up for a bit to be considered elite, otherwise Matt Stafford is already inarguably better and hence “elite.” Kurt Warner has my back on this (google it).

Let’s reserve that term for the two or three guys who are obviously better than everyone else and have maintained a high level of play for years: Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees. No sane person in the world (which automatically excludes Giants fans) would argue that any of the QBs I mentioned in the previous paragraph is better than any of those three, which is the best way to judge if someone is “elite” or not.

There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about what is Irish and what’s the best of that subset of things. St. Patrick, for instance, wasn’t Irish. He didn’t even like Ireland. He preferred Wales, if you can believe it. So he didn’t make this list, although some of his exploits did. I’ve done the research and have compiled a top five about Ireland to help you decide whether or not you like Ireland or maybe want to visit there. If you do, tweet the Irish Tourism Board (make sure it’s the verified account) and tell them I got you to go so they hook me up with some of this stuff. For free.

5) Four-Leafed Clovers. Clovers aren’t unique to Ireland, but four-leafed clovers used to be, until those damned English bastards stole them and used the powers contained therein to conquer the world. They are the luckiest of charms. This is the only kind of clover you’ll ever see in Ireland. St. Patrick had to have a 3-leafed variety imported because how are you going to explain the Trinity to a bunch of savages otherwise? When he tried to cultivate his own to avoid prohibitively high VAT rates, they withered and turned to dust. So moved was he by this display of the Irish clover’s power that he penned the traditional Catholic hymn, “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leafed Clover.”

4) Jigs. Truly the happiest of dances, suitable for any occasion. Originally created as a defensive mechanism due to snakes being everywhere all the goddamned time, it was the people’s primary form of locomotion. Babies were taught to jig before they could walk for safety reasons, leading to the popular Irish phrase “You’ve got to jig before you can jaunt.” Eventually St. Patrick cast the dust-eating belly-crawlers off the island until December 21st, 2012 (unrelated) and the jig was re-purposed as a sort of dance of gratitude and remembrance. Next time you find yourself doing a jig, imagine how much happier it would make you to be stomping on snakes all the while. 

3) Alcoholic beverages produced from malted barley. You’ve got beer and scotch; what more could anyone ask for? They’ve got a drink that will suffice to get you tight on any occasion. Beer at the pub with your mates or after a long day’s work in the potato fields, scotch when you’re required to not burp at social functions but hiccuping is still ok. Sorted. Much hay has been made of the Irishman’s penchant for drink, but why don’t you shut the fuck up about it son or I’ll show you a haymaker. 

2) The word “verdant.” Ireland is well-known as a country with rolling green hills, dense green forests and shrubbery, green eyes, and green beer. But things were not always thus. Originally things could be many different colors in Ireland, but the prehistoric indigenous Irish longed for more excuses to describe things as verdant. These mysterious people began a long campaign of painting and dying, animal husbandry, orchard management, and eugenics that continues greening up the people, places, and things of Ireland to this day. They even put the color green in their flag! A traditional Irish greeting is “verdant enough for ya?”

(I know what you’re thinking, and they do love green that much, it’s just that Irish snakes were all orange or purple.)

1) Potatoes. These things are so beloved around the world that some cultures probably worship them as gods. The Irish have claimed since antiquity that the seeds for the original potato crop were harvested from the first fruit of Yggdrasil the world-tree. That’s just a dumb myth since potatoes aren’t a fruit though (obviously). Actually, according to a wild-eyed man on the History Channel who has never been described as “kempt,” potatoes were entrusted to humanity by aliens who had transcended time, space, and most amazingly the desire for french fries. They are as incomprehensible to us as we are to the bumble bee. 

Ireland is a rich island with a fascinating history and complex culture. Some may quibble with the order, but I believe that taken as a whole my list is unimpeachable and very informative about the little realm’s Gaelic inhabitants. I hope that now you have a good idea of what it means to be Irish and understand why they’re so worked up about indistinguishable denominations of Christianity.

At some indeterminate point in the past - most likely between the Late Pleistocene Age and So Long Ago It’s Hard To Give A Fuck - people invented boats. Well… archaeologists claim that we invented boats around then to liven up their dissertations/get a guest spot on Aliens Gave Us Boats, Tuesday on H2. Really at that point they just had trees with interior leg room. Eventually around 5k years ago (the Finally It’s Interesting Era) we got it together enough to build proper boats, with sails and oars and topless ladies on the bow, and they were truly things of beauty. These bigass jawns took OD piles of money, slaves, and time to build, and the only people who even got to see the more impressive boats lived by the sea or were too rich. Boats were special, and it was an honor/privilege/supreme pussy magnet to captain a ship.

Nowadays any dick head with a full-time job and a 401k plan can own a boat that will take on the ocean. If she gets together with a couple buddies they can get their hands on something that’d destroy any warship you care to name through the mid-19th century. We have motors and proper guns now; we don’t have to rely on ramming your “starboard” side or hope the wind isn’t fussy that day cause it takes an estimated ten million years to aim a canon properly. Only ass holes get spiritual over boats anymore. 

For some reason we still put captains on a pedestal. Boats are just the cars of the sea though, and cars ain’t shit. Boats are actually easier than cars - there’s no traffic or hairpin turns in the ocean, and any shit who can sense what temperature it is can stay the fuck away from glaciers. Google weather aggregator will make sure you don’t Perfect Storm it up. I’m forecasting a 100% chance that I could learn to drive a cruise ship in an afternoon, my dude. 

Captains don’t have to worry about their crew doing a mutiny or coming down with scurvy, sea madness/lake lunacy, or Sodomy Of Necessity anymore. Big boats ain’t as rare and magical as they were back in Titanic days when women had to sail to international waters if they wanted to vote. We don’t address people who fly planes as pilot and that’s a lot harder (gotta be) than twirling a big wooden wheel around and looking at the horizon though one-eyed binoculars like “captains” do. But we still have all these noble expectations of regular ass people for no reason. Like that Italian dude, Francesco Schettino.

People are pissed at him for not going down with the goddamned ship. Son… Read that sentence again. Are you kidding me with this? It’s 20 fuckin 12, and we ain’t living in Tol Eressëa. Maybe it’s different for people catching The Most Dangerous Fish (Alaskan King Crabs??), but I’m sorry, piloting a cruise ship is not a Higher Calling or Sacred Duty anymore. It’s a fuckin job. 

I don’t know why so many people are freaking out about Skipper Spaghetti booking for a lifeboat ASAP. Seafaring tradition? Suck my entire dick. I’d have done the same goddamned thing and you stupit if you wouldn’t. Cruise ship captains are Megabus drivers on the waves. I am getting the fuck up out of there and ain’t a thing some coastguard hall monitor could say to make me get back on that boat. You can be sure my excuse wouldn’t be any better and I’d probably be crying on some one-word-per-breath, 3-year-old-knows-he’s-caught shit. But I wouldn’t give a fuck cause I’m not dead in the goddamned ocean. And Europe has decent social welfare for when I can’t lock down another job, so nbd.

Do you expect a Chinatown bus driver to go down with his shitbox in any event if he can help it? Naw. There’s actually a movie about this exact scenario called Speed. The hero of the film gets involved in a no-joke situation while driving - or land captaining - a city bus, and catches a bullet at one point. The other passengers work together to get him off the asphalt ship first - while they’re all still in danger! - and are happy to do so. The one person who thinks it’s ok to be selfish winds up dying horribly. RIP, but you still garbage, girl.

Surely someone working for public transit, responsible for getting hundreds of people to/from their jobs every day, should be held to a higher standard of civil responsibility than a hedonism-enabling freelancer like Boatmaster Bruschetta, but society never called bullshit on that film cause they wanted the dude to bleed out on the bus.

The only reason pilots ever go down with their plane/helicopter is because they have to. The guys equipped with ejector seats and parachutes get the fuck out of Dodge. Even Harrison Ford got off his plane. If the president ain’t going down with his airship I don’t see why Francesco shoulda. You stay greasy, Commodore Cream Sauce.

This article came out on Monday that, as far as I can tell, is a bunch of journalists/businesspeople giving themselves a tug about the abhorrent yet profitable conditions under which our iPhones are manufactured. I don’t know whether to be disappointed that a grip of sadistic capitalists are willing to be open about their proclivities or confused that what Americans have been going through the past few years hasn’t been enough to get them off.

Time makes fools of us all. 

Some dumb ass Apple executive talks about a plant in China that apparently 8k workers live at. One time when they got a delivery of parts after midnight, the bosses woke everyone up, gave them a tea and a cookie, and sent them to their workstations for a 12 hour shift. 

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

That flexibility… that speed! You can picture this creepy piece of shit, chest heaving, brow damp, hand absent-mindedly teasing his ass hole at the thought. 

Waking up a bunch of poor oppressed people who haven’t had a full night’s sleep and forcing them to neck some caffeine to begin mind-numbing work for half a day… that’s what we call flexible now? 8,000 people residing in company dorms is pretty breathtaking, admittedly. I bet the conditions they’re forced to put up with are even moreso. That’s something to be commended, something we should long for in American manufacturing? Imagine having to live with 7,999 of your coworkers to keep your job. Fuck me.

Maybe you shouldn’t lead off your woe-is-us propaganda about US workers’ shortcomings by painting a loving portrait of a situation that, by many reliable accounts, is worse than death.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

First of all, this fucking screen isn’t unscratchable anymore, so work on your fact checking, Gray Lady. My screen’s scratched all to fuck from being in my pocket with a chap stick and I had to buy one of those ridiculously marked-up plastic protectors for it (a good problem to have). Ever since they released the first iPhone they’ve taken dips in quality with each generation. You could have attatched the first one to the front of a pickup and plowed snow with it, but with the slippery 4s I’m afraid to set it down on any hard surface. Does this have anything to do with how they’re manufactured now as opposed to how it was done originally? Who knows! Certainly not anyone in a position to make any qualitative statements one way or the other.

Secondly, it’s odd to see lamentation of Americans’ productivity and how we can’t make anyone money anymore (even though we still somehow manufacture 10% of the parts here) next to a casual reference that some of the phone is manufactured in Germany, where people get paid more and treated better (also, healthcare). So it can’t have much to do with any inherent quality of American workers - that’s just the angle they decided to take when writing this article. It can’t be their availability, either; if you went to Detroit or any major city you could round up eight thousand unemployed people to manufacture iPhones without a doubt. Unfortunately, though, you won’t find them all living in the same facility, and you can’t treat them like chattel with the justification “it’ll save a few pennies per unit.” That’s the dealbreaker. Going into employees’ bedrooms at 1am and forcibly waking them up to start working in order to meet an arbitrary deadline is just icing for these people. 

So how did the US lose out on all the iPhone work? Sourcing parts and labor from a variety of countries makes Apple more significant profit. That’s all they’re interested in: more. Any way they can get it. Just more. And this isn’t some conspiratorial birther-type nonsense because they spell it out, for all of us, in black and white. It’s not just about making a profit; with how they’re willing to let their (subcontracted) employees be treated, it’s quite obviously about greed. Obvious, but it’s still funny to see it stated so plainly. 

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. People have been jerking illz to famed asshole Steve Jobs’ exploits for years now, and he’s responsible for all this shit even though he’s just as dead as the workers he drove to suicide. I figured that once he kicked the bucket (shout out to Steve’s pancreas btw), the spell would wear off. Maybe the comparisons to Edison or Ford would stop once we could remember that he didn’t actually invent anything or benefit the American worker in any way. The only substantial comparison between those guys is “amount of dickishness in one person.” It’s embarrassing for anyone think of him in those terms. PS, if this last bit is the part that got your hackles up or made you want to try arguing the point with me, lol at your life forever.