AT&T Disturbs Me.

I can't be the only one who's noticed how dark the AT&T Wireless commercials have gotten. I'm not talking about the mom with the stupid kids who don't want to use "old minutes," those are kind of clever. What I'm talking about are the "sorry I missed your call, I don't have any bars out here" ads. They started out pretty mundane but they took a very sudden, sinister turn. Here, I'll review:

• Dad looking for his daughter at local "make-out point." -- Okay, no big deal, kinda funny, whatever.
• Dude missing the Motörhead concert. -- Haha, stupid, Motörhead sucks anyway.
• College guy getting stuck in a hostel with creepy Euro-techno-trash. -- Wow, I would hate if that were me, but still nothing catastrophic.
• Hapless employee brings up the big corporate merger that was supposed to remain hush-hush, in a business meeting. -- That's probably going to affect a few 401(k)s.
  
• Children's birthday party terrorized by man in tyrannosaurus costume. -- Well, I tend to find crying children funny, but I know most people don't. This is a ruined family moment.
• Children traumatized by family's accidental trip to a nude beach. -- A more disturbing notion to some people than others, to be sure. But anyone would be traumatized at the sight of the senior citizens that insist on hitting the ol' clothing-optional beaches.
  
• Guy falsely arrested for trespassing, and thrown in jail. -- Wait, what? That is harsh. And they even made a thinly-veiled reference to forced prison sodomy.
• Man blows up his own house because he didn't know to thaw a frozen turkey before deep-frying. -- Hey, not funny... that was that guy's home. And he's all singed.
• An entire news crew gets BLOWN UP. -- Holy sh*t. This is how we're selling phone service?
  
• Special holiday-themed commercial features a snowman slowly melting away. -- Because nothing says "Season's Greetings" like a none-too-subtle reminder of the inevitability of death.
  

I'm sure I'm missing some, but the trend couldn't be clearer. I'm all for morbid humor, but this is friggin' scary. At least the Verizon commercials are just dumb; these make me check over my shoulder every time I use my AT&T phone.

I realize this blog is about three months too late to be considered even remotely current or relevant, but I don't especially care. Yes, there are already a bunch of parody ads on YouTube, but I don't have a video camera so I have to resort to this.

Given that it's been a while since I've seen one of these creepshows masquerading as advertisement, I can only assume that AT&T has run out of grisly ideas with which to terrorize their potential customer base. As a loyal AT&T subscriber, I am rushing to the rescue with two new fully-formed scripts, free of charge:

1. *beep!* "Hey, it's Staci's phone. Yeah, sorry we didn't get your call warning us that the guy Staci just met on the Internet and agreed to have dinner with, has a mile-long rap sheet full of sexual assault charges, but we don't get any bars out here in the dimly-lit roadside diner on the edge of town where Staci drove to meet this guy. So Staci's about to get violently raped and in all likelihood will be dumped in the woods ten miles from here, with even less chance of getting a decent signal. I guess when Mister Right's grimy, calloused hands are clamped around her neck and her dignity and self-respect are being pounded right out of her, Staci will wish she'd gone with AT&T instead. The thought that an AT&T phone could've prevented the soul-shattering humiliation, bruises, and internal bleeding will surely keep her warm on the long walk to the nearest free clinic to get a morning-after pill. Whoops, gotta go, the roofie's starting to kick in!"
   
   
2. *beep!* "Yeah, Chad's phone here, sorry Chad missed your call, but there's no signal out here on the remote island paradise where Chad decided to bring his girlfriend so he could propose to her. So your frantic calls and text messages about the sudden military uprising currently erupting in this little impoverished Caribbean nation, the coup that will certainly lead to months if not years of ferocious civil war? Nope, we didn't get 'em. When Chad and Misty are caught in the crossfire of a conflict they have nothing to do with, I hope you'll send their family sympathy cards instead of calling them, because they don't have AT&T either. True, Chad survived the attack, but the last thing he saw before blacking out in that jungle was a group of guerrillas dragging his beloved away, laughing about the fun they'd have with her, and how much cocaine they could buy with that big, shiny engagement ring. Nobody's seen Misty since. Oh, and try not to stare at the stumps where both of Chad's legs, and his right arm, used to be, when you visit him in the hospital. He's a little touchy about how the doctors had to remove them because of the infection that broke out at the bullet entry points. Maybe while you're trying to console the hollow shell of the man that used to be your buddy Chad, you can mention the sweet rollover minutes he can get if he switches to AT&T."

Dear AT&T: You're welcome.

The Magnolia Situation

Gonna take a detour from the blog I intended to write today to talk about the whole cluster-eff that has happened with ma.gnolia (hereby to be referred to as simply Magnolia, because I hate superfluous punctuation).

It is now day seven of Magnolia's outage, with no end in sight, and hope seems to be fading. Now, this isn't a national catastrophe or anything, but I had some really interesting bookmarks there and now I'm bummed that I may not get access to them again. I can't exactly stumble around the web looking for them all again, because I don't even remember what all was there.

I have been able to uncover a bunch of my bookmarks using the magic of Google cache, although I haven't started the process of transferring them to Delicious yet. So I'm happy about that. There are also a number of other recovery options being discussed on a thread that's been opened over at Get Satisfaction. I'm pissed at myself, though, for not being a little more forward thinking and having some sort of backup to my Magnolia stash. I never bothered setting up an RSS feed to dump into anything, and never once exported my bookmarks to a plain HTML file, because I'm lazy. I just figured, hey, it's an online resource, they've got to have their own backups if something goes wrong, right? Plus, at the end of the day it's only bookmarks. It's not like it's my bank account being compromised, and the content of those bookmarks is still floating around out there in the 'tubes.

I've learned my lesson, though: I pointed my Delicious RSS feed toward Google Reader, and I'll probably set up a reader on my own PC when I get home, to have a local backup. Kind of defeats the purpose of an online store of bookmarks, but I don't want to get burned again. I might check out other social bookmarking sites - Diigo was suggested by Magnolia founder Larry Halff, but it seems iffy to me. Lacks the simplicity I loved about Magnolia.

Anyway, the point of this post is to highlight a different posting, on the Get Satisfaction thread. Most of the conversation focuses on various methods of data retrieval, all from external sources like Google cache and FriendFeed, so people can get their bookmarks back. One guy, however, chose to go on a rant, quoting one of the first messages on the Magnolia homepage that discussed the severity of the outage. I'll just paste the whole thing here:

onionsformagnolia replied 9 hours ago

Larry, on your home page, you wrote:

"So far, my efforts to recover Ma.gnolia's data store have been unsuccessful. While I'm continuing to work at it, both from the data store..."

How is that possible? What is this "data store" you're talking about? Was there no back up?

"In this past year, many of us have seen much loss around us."

What does this have to do with the current problem, other than a lame attempt at deflection?

"While bookmarks seem small on the national or global scale, I know that many of you had built intellectual and social capital through the bookmarks, groups, and connections you made here."

A blinding flash of the obvious. So far, you've said many words without saying anything.

"Ma.gnolia was approaching the third anniversary of its public launch; for me, it was the project and people to which I'd devoted most of my time, energy, and love for nearly four years. It's still a little too soon to give word about the return of Ma.gnolia the service and the future of the M2 project, but I will keep this site and our Twitter account updated as those decisions are made."

You have nerve to even talk about the return of Magnolia and M2, whatever that is/was. Forget it. This "business", if it ever was viable, is now dead all but in name. I wouldn't entrust anything to you any more because of the way you've bungled this. You've been quite evasive in answering direct questions posed to you about what happened. If you owe at least one thing to Magnolia users, it's an honest explanation.

At the moment, it looks like I've lost thousands of bookmarks that I've added over the last couple of years and I did not have them anywhere else because I was foolish enough to assume that Magnolia was being run by competent people! To say that I'm pissed off is an understatement. The irony is that I had evaluated and rejected Delicious and SimpPy for reasons that I don't even recall any more. I've lost something of tremendous value and by the looks of it, I will not be able to recover anything since none of the "solutions" that you have posted so far work for me. I'm working on the assumption that any competent system administrator would have been able to get a server running by now and restored from a backup, even if *some* data was lost.

What happened? Your server got seized by creditors? You had a nervous breakdown? Ex-wife got the server? Your dog ate the server? Your server got abducted by aliens? You had a disk crash and hadn't done a back up since, well, ever?

It's hard to imagine how you could look any worse so I suggest you just come clean. If it's a matter of money, I'd contribute toward a solution but not without knowing the whole, unvarnished truth. So, how about it? Are you going to explain exactly what happened or are you going to continue your "keep 'em in the dark and feed them horse shit" communications strategy?

Harsh. I won't say this guy (girl?) doesn't make good points, because they are very good points. I had the same questions myself, once I realized that this wasn't a case of someone saying "this issue may take several days to correct" just to prepare people for the worst, only to have the site back up by noon the next day.

But let's have some perspective. You're talking about using a free online service (those who did pay for Magnolia's "premium" services will receive a refund, according to Larry) to keep track of information that you found useful on the Web. When you use something that's given away for free, your complaint leverage is greatly diminished. Especially when the tools were always available for you to backup your thousands of bookmarks.

I had a little over 300 bookmarks on Magnolia, well short of Mister Angry's thousands, and while I am miffed about potentially losing those, I'm more upset that I didn't give myself a fallback option. No contingency. My fault. If I had thousands of bookmarks, and if they were all that important to me, I would have made sure to have a backup. It would never occur to me to go on this kind of rant against a guy who's watching years of his hard work circle the drain and is already fully aware that the situation has upset a lot of people. I mean, I can get on a pretty hellacious rant, don't get me wrong, but over this?

Yet within hours this rant was upvoted as one of the "best points" on the discussion thread (albeit by a whopping 6 people as of this writing), above and beyond the actual constructive suggestions, and is featured at the top of the thread. It's a fine illustration of the testicular-inflation effect of the Internet.

The One Sentence Blog

Recently I discovered a site called One Sentence that asks you to submit a true story from your life in the form of a single sentence, and I found the idea so brilliant in its simplicity that I had to share it in my blog.

Reality TV Memes

It is with great, agonizing shame that I confess to occasionally watching the circus that calls itself "reality television." I am fully aware that these shows are utterly devoid of intellectual, moral, or sociological value, but there's something almost therapeutic about subjecting myself to this assault on good taste. I can't help but feel better about my own life when I see a bunch of idiots volunteering themselves to be publicly humiliated for weeks on end, in the hopes of gaining some small measure of fame and/or fortune. However much of a fat loser I am, I will never be the guy getting into a drunken fistfight with two other guys over a plate of cold nachos to impress some skank with serious self-esteem issues and a third-grade reading level who, even if I should emerge victorious from the gamut of debasement that comprises this "competition" for her "affection," will only dump me a week after the cameras shut off anyway.

In short, Sheila and I make sport of laughing at morons. We take great joy in it. You do too, don't lie. I can't even count how many ridiculous and sometimes even slightly clever one-liners we swipe from these shows and use in daily interaction with each other, because making fun of stupid people doesn't stop when the TV is turned off. Oh, no.

There's the fake drinking game inspired by Whitney "I Shouldn't Have Beaten Anya" Thompson from ANTM (do a shot every time she says "I'm plus size"), which later morphed into the "I'm a retired model" drinking game that ended too soon when whatever-that-dumb-waif's-name-is was forced to drop off the Rock of Love bus due to health problems. I was looking forward to making fun of her some more. There's our impersonation of Jason and Grant from Ghost Hunters ("Well, we got some video where you can see an eight-foot tall apparition of some sort of ungodly goat-man, which pointed at us and said 'Hey, I'm a ghost, get the f**k out of my house,' and then the dining room table levitated off the ground and anally violated our camera guy, but I just don't think that's enough evidence for us to say this house is haunted"). Then, Real Chance of Love gave us "Fake-ass Puffy," which we declared to be the new "Nappy-headed Ho."

These things are stupid as hell but they make us laugh. We started jokingly referring to them as memes. Really, the only thing that separates a stupid inside joke from a meme is the number of people who are in on the joke.

So our current brain-rotting poison of choice is Tool Academy. This show can only be described as awesome by way of pathetic. Plus, by the time the first episode was halfway over, it had served up two such "memes." In fact, I'd like to see these become actual Internet memes, because everybody should find humor in the things that I think are funny but really shouldn't because they are actually just stupid.

The first (and weaker) of the two is the transformation of the phrase "Mister Awesome" into an adjective. Is something so truly mind-bogglingly amazing that "awesome" alone is painfully ill-equipped to describe it? Well, then, it is Mister Awesome.

I shall present an example:

Dude 1: "Dude, did you see the trailer for Transformers 2?"

Dude 2: "Oh, hells yeah, dude, it was...
"

But the crown jewel in this regalia of buffoonery is: "Mega please." The words tumbled out of that heifer Margo's mouth and into my very central nervous system. To truly appreciate it, it must be understood in its original context, so if you haven't already seen it, check it out here. Suffer through the ad, jump to about the 6:45 point and enjoy.

This phrase (much like the entire show) exudes some kind of primordial, incomprehensible blend of idiocy and brilliance that it makes me want to laugh just thinking about it. It cries out to be meme-ified. Are you perusing your favorite news aggregate site, or discussion forum, or blog, when you come across an incredibly inane, implausible, or otherwise ridiculous comment made by some trollish fop (or, y'know, a stupid post like this one)? Hit 'em with one of these...

...and hear the "Oohhh, snap!" reverberating all across the interwebs.

I might just shop this around over at 4chan. Everyone knows if you want a meme to take hold, it's gotta start at 4chan. Every single Internet meme in the universe originated there. Even memes that existed prior to 4chan originated at 4chan. I don't know how that works. 4chan is a strange and frightening place, to be avoided at all cost. Unless you're trying to get a meme to take root.

I don't want to be that guy, though. You know, the guy who tries to force something to happen that really ought to just happen organically. The guy who makes up a random nickname for himself and insists that other people call him by that nickname in everyday conversation. You can't give yourself a nickname.

I also don't want to be the guy that people come looking for in six months when "Mega please" has run its course, is all over the Internet, and everybody is sick of it but people still keep using it and why won't it go away it's not funny anymore aahhhhhh!!!

So, like I was saying, this is the new Rickroll, people. You saw it here first. Well, no, come to think of it, you probably didn't.