Categories
Glot

Dawkins Envy

It’s easy to be misled when you want to believe. That’s the lesson that Richard Dawkins is here to teach us today.

I like Richard Dawkins. He’s a hard-working man, a man with strong beliefs and ideas and principles. He’s written many books on evolution and its related genera. He also coined the word “meme” way back in 1976. And, apparently, he’s a blogger. But who has time to read blogs anymore though, honestly? So I was pretty thrilled thee days ago when I discovered his now six-day-old account on Twitter. Finally! I can follow the day-to-day musings of a bona fide scientist, one who’s books I’ve actually read, from the comfort of a corner of my monitor’s real estate.

The rest of Twitter was pretty happy too. It’s one of those things where @hrheingold tells @tyrsalvia and she tells me and @sfslim hears it from both of us, from whom @Kalli hears it, and before long everyone within shouting distance knows that Dr. Dawkins is enjoying poached salmon with Hollandaise sauce and a nice chardonnay. The magic of the modern age.

It made me imagine a smart uncle who gives sweet and worldly advice, like what I read about two hours ago:

While I still have 1700 of you paying attention, I just wanted to say: Whatever you believe, respect others beliefs. It’s not wrong to be kind to people who don’t believe the same as you. You don’t have to be militant atheists. People who claim to be Christians can be hypocrites, but they’re just people, and all people make mistakes. Try to be good to one another. That is my message of peace to all of you. Love one another. It’s ok.

Things could’ve just left off there. What nice sentiment, if… uncharacteristic. But it went on…

Consider that being hostile towards others has never won any followers. Richard Dawkins is just an old man trying to leave behind a legacy. Just like I, a Chrisitan [sic] do not follow Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, don’t be mislead [sic] by someone just because they share your belief system. It’s easy to be against people who are different than you, but try not to be like that. Take the high road, unlike RD. Thanks for listening and following along. Have a nice day.

I see. Ok, I see. So the whole thing was just to attract readers so that someone might make a statement about… the real Dawkins’ religious beliefs. Why, now that you mention it, he is one of the world’s most outspoken atheists. He has enemies. Well then, I suppose that impersonating him and misleading his fans is a perfectly legitimate way to express your disagreements with him, and certainly not counter to any message you may have earnestly wanted to deliver. Well-played, chap (this is my sarcastic font).

You fooled me at least, although others were not so easily duped. I mean, I understand why people read the updates from Fake Ira Glass and Fake Stephen Colbert. Those are entertainment personalities. I mean, it wasn’t as if anyone was seriously hoping @DarthVader was, in fact, a mischievous James Earl Jones. To some degree the creative impulse is spawned by simply having a username free. Lord knows I understand that, having recently been acquainted with cyber-squatters. I considered being the escaped Philip K. Dick robot for a time. I never wanted to be the robot, of course — I just wanted to pretend to be him on the internet; to take on that persona and explore it till I reached a conclusion.

Fake Dawkins realized his conclusion rather quickly, and the warning signs were there all along, if one were to look. Dr. Dawkins was in Oxford, but somehow his timezone wasn’t. Second, he missed a Douglas Adams reference, though one might assume he wouldn’t since he wrote the man’s eulogy. Of course, something all 1700 of us missed, the fifth tweet: “I hope this will open a new avenue of communication for atheists and non-believers on the web.” The plan laid bare.

Nothing sinister there, I suppose. Nothing more sinister than duping a bunch of teenagers into thinking a cool band is gonna play for prom, then having a bunch of local reverends dress up as Devo. Which, come to think, would be much much cooler than Fake Richard Dawkins. My one truest and shiniest hope is that we’ve learned something here today. Something about belief; indeed, faith. Twitter’s not real… and neither is the internet. It’s all made up from our heads just like evolution. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s all just concepts. The concept that, yes, I can peek in on the wondrously normal lives of those famous and endeared to me, and I can know them as I never would have before, and I can—at moment’s notice—respond to them personally and have them respond in kind. Well, it wasn’t real. That’s ok. Often the reality is never as good as the fantasy (mmm… hollandaise sauce). But then again, one can always hope that it will be.

EDIT: I’m just gonna leave this right here:

Categories
Glot

Here Or.in My Imagination

Couple days ago, I registered or.in. How awesome is that!? Today, I don’t have it. Just in case you happen to be reading this and somehow don’t know how large an internet nerd I am, I am a large internet nerd. This would be a life achievement. Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, owns the singular and unavoidably memorable ma.tt. He inspired me to try. See what he did? He’s didn’t get a .com (cause he’s not a company), nor a .org (he’s not an organization) and not a .name neither (cause anyone who registers anything with that domain is a sucker). Those .coms, .orgs, and .names are collectively called Top Level Domains, or TLDs, and there’s a lot of them. Most of them are for countries, which have the privilege of using only two letters. Every .tv and .fm you’ve ever been to? They’re actually licensed from Tuvalu and, yes, the Federated States of Micronesia (which, interestingly, has one and only one FM radio station1). But how did Matt happen to luck upon a .tt? It’s the assigned country code (ccTLD) domain for Trinidad and Tobago. He paid $500 a year for it. Yikes. It’s their ccTLD; they can charge whatever they want. That clever little trick of using both sides of the dot is known as a domain hack, and they’re pretty neat. Not only does it save on typing, it’s more memorable, simple yet exotic, and… well, special. What web-addict doesn’t dream of having the coolest dot-anything? I do. This was actually the latest big disappointment in a string of small ones.

It started slowly, last December, with a single, simple, unanswered, email:

I’m interested in a domain which has this email address listed as the administrative contact, and would like more information if someone was interested in acquiring it.

Thank you,
-Orin

I tried again later, trying to stay with the subtle approach:

Hello, I wrote about a month ago and I’m still interested in a domain which has this email address listed as the contact. I would like more information if someone is interested in acquiring it. Thank you.

Then in February I just came out and said it:

I want to buy Zebest.com. Please respond.

In the beginning of May I stumbled on the genius idea that to use the magic word “money:”

I am interested in purchasing the domain “Zebest.com.” I’d like to know if it is available and for how much money. Please reply.

By May 20th I had had enough, and I wasn’t gonna take it anymore:

I would like to buy the domain Zebest.com. I’d like to know how much money it will cost. Additionally, I have decided to email you every day until you reply. Hopefully this will soon elicit response.

The emails to follow were quick and decisive:

  • Still very interested in Zebest.com. Please contact me.
  • Hey! I’d like to buy zebest.com. Please email me back.
  • Hi. I would like to buy Zebest.com. Is it available?
  • Hello, my name is Orin and I am interested in the purchase of one of your domains, Zebest.com. Please write back and I will provide you with further information on my offer.
  • Hi there! Remember me? I am interested in buying http://www.zebest.com. Please write me back, as I am planning on continuing to write these annoying emails.
  • Seriously. Write me back. This is ridiculous.

I tried different email addresses without much luck:

Some of my mail has been returned that I recently sent to Zebest.com. I assume that you are no longer using it. Please email me back with information on the small fee you will charge for it.

After the reverse psychology didn’t work (surprise surprise) I tried contacting the actual web host:

Hello,

I’ve been trying to get in touch with the owner of the domain “zebest.com” for some time now. The email address listed, [email protected], gets no response. ModernEmpire.com itself is little more than a single image. I’m trying to purchase this domain, and am willing to make an offer. I simply need someone at the other end to actually be there to take my money.

Hope to hear back soon.

Here’s an excerpt of what I got back:

For Future reference please contact the owner of the domain name directly and address your questions to them. This way you will be able to get an accurate and up to date answer that is authorised from the owner. You can obtain the owners details of a domain name by conducting a ‘whois’ look up [ORZ: why yes, thanks for reminding me how I emailed you to begin with!].

Please note that the domain owner is required to list accurate contact details however are not necessarily required to respond to them. If you experience any email bounces or disconnected number please send us proof of these so we may further investigate this. Kind regards.

I’d just about given up hope of ever getting a domain I wanted. Then a series of events led me to try and find a very short domain name, and I was considering zbst.in or orz.gs or something elsewise forgettable. Then… silver sepulcher of the holy squee! Or.in is available!? I bought it at 11:50am June 13th the same minute I found it, and for $14. Can you imagine? Who cares if the drive’s across town, the price is right and the location is beautiful. So I finally got to send the email I’d been building up to:

You know what? I don’t need you or the domain, you lazy Chinese cyber-toad [his address is listed as a P.O. Box in Hong Kong]. I ended up getting something much better. For the record, my last name is ZEBEST. It would’ve been nice to have that name on the internet. I liked the joke I could tell (which I’m sure you don’t get): “this is my dot-com. It’s zebest!” My whole name is built on that kind of silliness, dammit! But no, you couldn’t even write me back. Not once. Not even a one-line reply in another language saying “I can’t understand you. Go away.” or “not for sale!!! >:-[” No, I bet all those emails I sent didn’t even get to a real person. I bet your inbox is set up just like a garbage chute—your own little insta-flush. You don’t care. You just want your monthly pittance from the meager stream of people who have the misfortune to stumble onto your pre-made, low-pagerank, keyword-guessing, popup-popping cesspool. You’re happy to leech off the ugly teat of spam-master Fabulous.com. You are trying hard to make the internet suck, and I hope that every domain you have gets blocked or sold out from under you and you never make a penny.

If ever again we meet, it shall be as enemies. Good day sir.

-Orin Robertjohn Zebest

It was too good to be true, of course. It always was. Of course, it was the next day when the sentence “.IN domain names may be between 3 and 63 characters in length” began to haunt me. I didn’t realize something at the time, which is this: the domain name system is broken. Borked. Gone pear-shaped. Mostly people don’t realize this until they try to get a domain for… really anything desirable.

Practically any .com of any English word eight letters or less is long gone. Every possible combination of two and three-letter domains, including numbers, has been taken, as are most four-letters. Hell, that’s what started the ridiculous trend of of picking nonsense words, favored by web 2.0. So dot-coms are out. Of course, any popular website is going to have evil doppelgangers (even if they don’t make sense)—like another domain hack, del.icio.us, which spawned icio.co.uk, icio.org, and icio.net. And why is this? Cause it turns out you can make money by doing nothing. The domain name system is largely first-come, first-serve. Let’s figure it costs between 5-20 dollars a year to register a “normal” domain, depending on this ‘n’ that TLD. But, in that year, if it gets enough suckers blindly stumbling onto a keyword-based ad page, no matter how painfully anti-useful, you can sell some bulk advertising to other suckers. Hence: “Have your ads seen by four million people on half a million sites! Click here!” Never mind that works out to 8 visitors per site; people still buy those ads. People are suckers.

I’ve heard that ICANN, who runs the whole damned domain system, has been flirting with bankruptcy for many years2. An argument could be made that the motivation behind creating generic TLDs such as .biz, .name, .pro, .info, .coop, and *gasp* .mobi are just a way to milk the squatters for all they’re worth (have you ever actually used a site with one of those domains? One?). It’s just a way for somebody higher up on the sucker pyramid to milk the suckers below. So in that regard I salute their efforts. There’s really not much the rest of us can do, except maybe sign a silly petition. Or get desperate, just because:

Ok, I’ll give you $50. Paypal, Credit Card, money order, whatever. Seriously. Right now I just kind of want the mystery solved.

Funny thing, that. The admin of zebest.com never answered. The next day I found out something important: Modern Empire Internet Limited (or Ltd.) and modernempire.com is run by a scammer who will try to take your money3. It’s owner, who has publicly listed his address as 26H Block 7, Beverly Gardens, Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong, with a phone number of +852.25255582 and fax of +852.25255582, has several trademark decisions against him4 5 6. His alias/name is Franky Tong7. I really don’t like that he has my domain, but there’s nothing I can do about it except link to incriminating evidence that he should, in fact, be banned from the internet. Can we do that yet? Is that possible?

I still don’t have my domain. That’s the sad part. But, as it turns out, the ICANN overlords have come up with a brilliant solution to the overwhelming domain name supply crunch: let companies register whatever TLD they want. This is wonderful news! Finally, it looks like everyone will have a fair chance to register the name they want, and the economy of scarcity that arises whenever a theoretically-finite yet practically-infinite resource is purposefully restricted will vanish, and we will never have to pay lawyers to deal with ludicrous trademark infringements ever again, and we’ll all live in fairyland with magical squirrels who bring us breakfast in bed every day! My optimism is empirically biased towards sarcasm. But hey, it’s a start. Just not zebest start.

Categories
Glot

Bulgarians

Odd to think there’s a whole country of them. Well, I mean, I’m sure there’s not a whole country full of them who can sing like Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, but still… the music is fascinating. It was when I went to see them perform at Grace Cathedral on May 28th.

I couldn’t tell you exactly where we sat (as Lynae decided to come at the last minute), it’d be the front row of the back section (apse?), carefully behind the singers… my architectural jargon isn’t up to spec. Nor could I try and easily explain how I became interested in this specific musical niche, the convoluted methods that I useta employ finding listening material. I can’t even tell you what I heard… not would I care to try and learn (then explain) what modal scales or dissonant harmonies are.

I found a recording that might possibly clarify. At right, the group sings one of our less sophisticated American folk songs. The harmonies are totally off, aren’t they? Not off, just… odd. They’re of a different logic. The mentality is different. Sitting there, listening to song after song and having a different internal experience each time, I envisioned mountain landscapes where women signal to each other over vast distances. The microtonalities made sense, because doesn’t a nuanced emotion deserve expression as much as a powerful one?

Dressed in their traditional outfits for the first half, they were a little too precious. I waved at one of the resting soloists and she waved back—just in time for me to bashfully turn my head. These were Bulgarians! How many times had I listened to them on my iPod on the subway? And here they were in their delightful little Bulgarian costumes! The second half was much better for me; dressed in formal blackwear, coven-esque, it became only about the music and less about the novelty of having an ethnic experience (for an ethnic group, I might add, that I’ve personally checked in to stay at a hostel where I worked).

It was surprisingly immersive; songs were in a different scale for hours afterward. It was a joyful way to break out of that subway. It made something which had become just “one more thing I’m into” and made it “something I’ve done.” It was a good thing to spend fifty bucks on.

Categories
Glot

Roommating

Goodbye, old roommate. Hello new roommate. Oh! Hello, second new roommate.

Jerome got his bed yesterday. He was sleeping on the couch before that. He was sleeping in our apartment because he’ll be staying with us the next three months. Three months! This is Jerome (and this is Jerome en English). He is Quebecois, from Quebec City. An international traveler extraordinaire, he planned a three-month internship as a Mac developer, not to mention found a place to stay (with me), completely through Gmail. That’s impressive.

Jerome, meet Rhiannon. She’s our roommate—as of two weeks ago. Yup. She had to move three times in the past two months to find a place as good as ours. She’s planning on settling down and having some action figures. We met her at Bad Movie Night and kept coming back, long enough to make friends with the girl taking our $5 every week. Now it’s free for us. You can come too, Jerome, and be subjected to the horror that is “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” It’s ok, though! It didn’t actually win any Razzies, so that means it must be a good movie.

Nice to finally introduce you two. This place isn’t the cleanest in the world, now that our former roommate is gone. She sure liked that cleaning. So there’s some Dr. Pepper boxes that are being saved for no reason. We’ve got extra couches, now (not sure what to do with those). I’ll be the first to admit that there’s too many open projects to count. Expect things to be in unlikely places, like my hats on the couch or network cable strung up in the hallway. It’s a creative disorder, a constantly brewing ferment of materials and activities and ideas all swirling around in too small a space for their own good. Welcome.

Categories
Smartglot

Three Ideas

Idle in-brain conversations. Background noise that rambles on and sometimes if we’re lucky goes somewhere. I was sitting eating a burrito the other day. This noise went somewhere; what do yo think?

1st idea: Evolution. Selection. The world of man. A species’ environment determines which genes are favored. It determines what genes stick around. In humans, self-determined environment (society) is usually more important than the natural world. So there’s a feedback loop. People create their environment, which favors people who can better live in it, and have children who continue to live a life to which they are suited. A possible genetic tendency towards cultural aspects. Accelerated specialization. Patterns within a culture and the ensuing sexual selection might explain geographic racial features. How an individual deals with turmoil and struggle is tied with one’s spiritual beliefs. We can have a culture that shapes its gods a certain way, and people within it who adhere to those gods. Feedback. Some concept emerges somewhere, spreads through society, and favors those predisposed to it. Or it might find more fertile minds somewhere else, and the seeds will grow elsewhere. Memetics influencing genetics. For instance, Greece no longer is made of Greeks, but ethnic Turks. Yet in academia, a major in Classics might as well be called “European Studies.” Through the influence of ideas their values live on in a populace both inheriting them and built to inherit them.

2nd idea: Predation. Digestion. Nature’s law. Organisms get better nutrition from sources closest to themselves. Carnivores spend less time eating than herbivores do, because it’s more work digesting plant fibers than animal protein. Go back far enough and all organisms are theoretically related. Life was just self-replicating bacteria. A few billion years later some became Eukaryotes, which are distinguished by their ability to eat other things (like bacteria). Everything that grew from them—animals, plants, fungi—inherited the capacity to derive sustenance from other life. The more alike, the easier that is.

3rd idea: I find those two ideas I just had quite interesting. I wonder if I can link them together. Let’s see.. they’re both centered around evolution and assimilation. Things diverge over countless years and then re-absorb quickly, converging like long-lost puddles. If they were puddles of oil and water they wouldn’t come together so easily. It’s about how easy it is. How easy it is to assimilate something is directly correlated to how similar it is. There’s my topic sentence.

Hm. That was interesting. Those idle thoughts led somewhere. Even if it turns out there’s an existing scientific theory that says about as much, it’s fun to derive these concepts myself. I do recommend trying it sometime.

photos by cwiener08 and rusty shackelfurt

Categories
Glot

Laptop Challenge ’08!

Quite unexpectedly, there is a laptop in lap. First, a short story; after that, a short mission.

Unintentional DecorationMy girlfriend’s laptop sucks. For many months, a sticker that reads UR STUPID has presided just above the little embossed HP logo on the front. It has performed to expectations admirably. It’s noisy, it runs too hot and then freezes up, and it’s got some unidentified white material melded in places (no, not the Nik’l Nips you see pictured to the right, a different odd white material). All this until a few weeks ago, when I disassembled the dern thing and managed to clean out the hairball of dust-clog lodged in the gills of the heatsink. If that made no sense to you, don’t worry—suffice to say that I fixed the noise and overheating. Of course, I hadn’t counted on somehow creating a worrisome problem whereby the computer runs normally for minutes or hours or days, but then without warning shuts off entirely. No warning. Entirely. Needless to say this was distressing for the female involved and she decided that she’d spent enough years trying to get it to run properly. That’s why she’s got a brand-new Lenovo. Yup, brand-new. That’s why that particular “girlfriend’s laptop” I was just talking about—it no longer exists.

Instead, it is now boyfriend’s laptop. Yes, after a thorough disassembly, and soldering some suspicious components, including an motherboard battery knocked loose from its moorings, the computing P.O.S. seems to be much less “S.” So yeah. Laptop. I have it. Wow, what an interesting story. Mainly I just wanted to tell it so that everyone understands that this was totally not my plan, I take no responsibility for my good fortune, and I am an oft-resourceful compu-person.

Part two, fun part: the challenge for you. The laptop has doodles all over it, girly colored sharpie squares that have worn away and make it look like the laptop of an indulgent Lisa Frank fan. This is unacceptable. I’ve decided to use my my own means to cover the thing in words. I’ve always liked words. I would like some things to say. Inspired by #2, “crowdsource the name of your new unicycle” on this list of 5ives…

Guidelines:

  • the stickers will be ALLCAPS, hand-typed on an ancient “hobbyist” Dymo labelmaker
  • keep phrases short; there’s only room on one “line” for 56 characters (including spaces)
  • speaking of characters, I got 0-9, A-Z, period (.) and slash (/) and that is it
  • don’ try an’ make me put anything that I wouldn’t want my mother to see, yokay?
  • they’ll be printed in any color you want, as long as it’s black (mayyybe blue)
  • Twitter responses ok, GLOT comments ok
  • 56 * 29 lines = 1624 characters, average English word length is 5.1, +1 space per word, that’s only 266 words, people! Not a lot!

Orin’s new computer: now accepting submissions.

Categories
Glot

The Death of a Website

Like I told the bagpipe bandleader, none of us are really sure how to commemorate the life of a website. Part of that is because, hey, a website isn’t really alive. So it’s a difficult question. How do you remember?

I remember when I wrote about it. There was such beautiful harmony in this clever system of giving people thumbs-up and earning points for photo contests and answering ridiculous yet thought-provoking questions. I’ve long had an affinity for non-binding imaginary point systems, that fact is known to many.

It was sad when I heard that it would be going offline. Unsolemn VigilI had a spree-day contacting people I’d met on there once or twice, people I liked but never really kept in touch with. Does anyone reading this remember when Flickr used to be mostly just bloggers with cool pictures they wanted to host? Every photo had an interesting reason to be there; you had to portion out which photos you uploaded cause you only had 20mbs a month to work with. So you only only put up the best ones. Either that, or you shilled out the $60 to become… pro. Lots of websites go through that high-quality early-adopter content-building phase. Consumating never had a chance to outgrow that magical period, and I’m bittersweetly thankful. I sound silly enough waxing about Flickr.

So I’ll just remember it how it always was: silly; playful; packed with interesting people, far too interesting; a perfectly crafted time-waster; the spirit of an age. Not bad for a site that started life as joke personals ads.

Categories
Stuff-n-Glot

Peep Peep Peep Uh-Oh

Only took me only two days, which I’m pretty proud of. Turns out that I already know how to do all this stuff. I already had all the audio editing and video encoding software, music mixing experience, radio editing experience, and know-how from encoding movies for torrents, even back to originally making StarCraft vocal effects (Mom and Dad, my life in middle school was not wasted). I had the camera and tripod although the relatively recent addition of a wireless trigger certainly helped. I did have to download a new stop-motion editor, but honestly it’s just a glorified slideshow viewer with powers of copy & paste. Had the skills to do it all along.

And I did it. Just came up with the idea and did it. Took me 40 hours from the first shot to uploading it to YouTube — did that because it gets a lot more viewers than Vimeo, even though Vimeo is far more awesome. That time includes sleeping, too. It’s only a little over a minute but that minute took an hour and change to shoot. It took more than eight hours to record and position and add effects to all the vocals — the peep and the Pteranodon. There was the small matter of finding appropriate music, and then finding a decently clean copy of said music. Many more spent figuring out why my encoder was spitting out error messages like “Virtualdub program failure — out-of-bounds memory access (access violation) occurred in module [anyoldthing.dll] while encoding [some random frame that’s never consistent].” Opened up the computer, blew away a bunch of dust, and now she’s never run better. Lesson learned.

How I made it is sort of interesting to me, but I’m sort of done with it now. Set it aside, Orin. What I’m now more interested in is what you all think of it. Questions I want answered: what amused you? Should I make more of them? Most importantly, I need more ideas for how to get rid of the five boxes of Peeps I got for a discount after Easter — last Easter. Seriously. I shouldn’t eat them. I should kill them.

Categories
Stuff-n-Glot

Zeitgeist in a Nutshell

Zeitgeist the Movie. Ok, I just finished watching it. First reactions: a little depressing. A little tricked into watching it cause I followed a blind link on advice from a friend that it was “definitely worth seeing.” Not disappointed, no. Not at all. Not entirely. Maybe a little. Yeah, it kinda sucked… I mean, you really had me in the beginning because you must know how much I enjoy unraveling complexity, but did you really mean all that stuff about Jesus and Horus? And then you present all these brain-tingling conspiracies about September 11th and move into… international finance and then… RFID chips? The trans-American highway? What is this? Well, I did like watching it while I watched it, at least. I think I would perhaps possibly say with a little tentative conviction that it is worth seeing. Before doing so, bear in mind four things:

  1. This movie is nearly 2 hours long and you may be compelled (like I) to watch all of it
  2. If you are religious many “theories” may “bother you” or simply make you “pfft”
  3. if you find conspiracy theories annoying you will find this move annoying
  4. millions of people have seen it already (supposedly the most popular video ever hosted by Google Video)

I was originally gonna post the video within this post but decided that, actually, on reflection, I don’t really care enough about this movie or if people see it so instead I’ll just put a link here again.

Also, it’s worth noting that you may need a much smarter analysis than mine.

photo by • Sandra • on Flickr

Categories
Glot

Prestige of the Pillowfight

It’s not a unique occurrence. For the past two years, and now three, there’s been a pillow fight in this town on Valentine’s day in the biggest business plaza the city has to offer.

It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s paradoxically photogenic. There’s something about a thousand pillows violently, desperately thrashing about in a great throng of struggling, giggling humanity that’s very life-affirming. Or something. All I know is that last year I got deep-throated by some else’s (probably pre-used) pillow feathers and this year I wore a face shield and took pictures instead. And why did I take pictures instead of actually fighting in a pillow fight? Well, like Jane Waterbury (who took the photo to the right) I think having pictures of cool stuff that I’ve gone to makes me cooler. Well, I think that’s what she thinks. It’s what I think. Show ’em off to friends who weren’t there, so that you can prove it. “See what I did for Valentine’s day? You know it’s awesome and that’s why you’re going next year! That’s why you want one in your own town!” It’s what many many many people must be thinking because the number of cameras there was sheerly staggering. You’d think the Superbowl was going on. Except, well…

My personal opinion is that a pillow fight is FAR cooler than the Superbowl. How passé—paying to go to something fun? I am of a new generation that eschews these more manipulative entertainments in favor of those which we ourselves create. We are… enlightened. Sometimes.

Also, I can’t stress enough how many hotties there are that go to this thing every year.