Uh, oh, Noctivigant’s bored. While normally I would pay an disgruntled reader as much mind as I do laws regarding public drunkenness, public nuisance, or public urination, Noctivigant is unique in that he knows my home address. So I try to keep him placated, since unlike most angry commenters, he can troll me via telephone, or if he chooses, by short car ride and motorcycle chain whip.
Personal circumstances have rendered my motivation to regularly write here or via Twitter feed damn near nonexistent. March’s Watchmen Death Flu turned into the Rorschach Death Bronchitis, which led to the Nite Owl Death Chest X-Ray, which concluded with the Dr. Manhattan Disturbingly Large Death Hose Down My Throat to take pictures of my lungs.
Pictures that were utterly clean save the filthy insurance money and $150 HMO co-payment they grabbed to perform the completely unnecessary test… none of which apparently went to sweet, sweet free drugs. Note to my lung specialist: if, after the administration of “sedatives”, I panic when a tube is snaked down my throat? You have not sedated me. It’s time to embrace health care reform when 2,000 years of modern pharmaceutical technology is outperformed by street dope available to the dumbest 19-year-old college date rapist.
Throw on top of that wretched experience of continued financial anxiety in the face of continued rising unemployment, the constantly falling price of my home, and the fact that my home state has chosen to tax the alcohol that’s prevented me from fomenting popular revolution for the past twenty years (Now that’s sedation! You getting this, “doctor”?), and it’s hard to get whipped up to spend three hours before work cranking out 800 words on the folly of President Obama bowing before the Saudi king when everyone knows that he had to do it. Because al-Saud loves us; he only hit us with four-buck-a-gallon gas to show us that we were wrong, and wanted to teach us a lesson. Besides, it was all our fault; those nineteen guys weren’t terrorists, the World Trade Center just walked into a door. Anyway.
But I was finally motivated to come back to the keyboard by the bungled election and corresponding public and media clusterfuck in Iran. Before this past weekend, I’m not even sure I was aware that an election was happening there, and even if I was, I probably dismissed it as the equivalent of boxing match where one of the fighters is managed by Don King: you can brave the rotten crowds and show up, but it’s not like there’s gonna be a surprise ending. Besides, I may just be a drunken comedian from Boston, but even I know that the mullahs are the ones actually calling the shots in Iran, and that when you put religious fanatics in charge of a community, people are gonna get fucked. Ask the Catholic church.
But it seems nobody bothered to tell the people of Iran that the election was fixed before they even set the date, and when Khamenei’s golden boy coasted to a statistically improbable victory, massive protests started in Iran. Which would have been interesting to watch on TV if any of the news channels had bothered to cover it. While Iran erupted with protests that could theoretically change the course of Middle Eastern politics, CNN was running a rerun of Larry King talking to the cast of American Chopper about the new season (“Well Larry, I’m gonna build motorcycles and call my retarded sons retarded. In every episode. Just like every other episode for the past five years. In the finale we’re gonna paint a shark on the motorcycle and cut out the middleman.”).
But it turns out that the interesting part was that, news media paying attention or no, word was getting out anyway. Even with every journalist in Iran under government lockdown, the people involved in the demonstrations were reporting what was going on on the Internet. The general population was able to reproduce the work of the traditional news media using only dial-up Internet, outdated desktop computers and old Super 8 camcorders… proving once and for all that, no matter your religious beliefs, local customs or political beliefs, Iran is a still technological third-world toilet that I wouldn’t be caught dead in. Even if I wouldn’t be executed as a spy the second I arrived there.
It is impossible to to anything worthwhile with a 28.8 modem; with that tech, it takes a week to download enough pixels to be able to jerk off, let alone depose a government. You’ve got a better shot with first generation cell phones, but only if you hold it to the Ayatollah’s head for forty minutes and have the six months to wait for the brain tumor to kill him. And you are seriously fucking deluded if you think you’re going to bring down a world leader using grainy videotape when that couldn’t even destroy Paris Hilton. No, for this project, you’re going to need the finest in modern technology.
This is the G1 Smartphone. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, two-megapixel combination still camera / camcorder, and a constant high-speed connection to the Internet. And, since Google produced the OS, it is completely and seamlessly integrated with Google online services like Picasa and YouTube. It also grabs hi-def, fully-soundtracked porn out of the sky at a dizzying speed, and therefore disperses the line at Dunkin’ Donuts almost as fast.
This bad motherfucker allows the owner to shoot a video and, within seconds, make that video available to the world. Combine that with real-time integration with Twitter, if someone had one of these phones, a lightweight laptop with Wi-Fi, and a Web site to integrate the content, that person would have his own full-blown news channel, including almost-live pictures and video, a news crawl and detailed reporting and commentary that could fit inside your underpants. And, given that it’s me, will probably report from there, because I firmly believe that the inside of my underpants hasn’t gotten nearly enough coverage. Since I’m Irish, it’ll be light news… hopefully a puff piece. With a happy ending. God, I’m lonely.
Anyway. So in short: good for the people of Iran, but this is America. We’ve got the tools, we’ve got the talent, and we’ve got more important shit to be reporting about.
No, not my underpants; have some priorities. Comic-Con’s about a month away.
[tags]San Diego Comic-Con, Iran, election, dark humor, satire[/tags]
’bout time.
nice.
carry on.