Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

Timmy's in the Sandbox, Checking Bloomberg News

The AP is reporting that "A cheap laptop boasting wireless network access and a hand-crank to provide electricity is expected to start shipping in February or March to help extend technology to school-aged children worldwide." In other words, we're about to start enabling in our young kids the same sullen, narcissistic self-absorption our teenagers currently enjoy. To which Mr. Irresponsible can only say: Good job! Bring it on!

A teenager who's jacked into an iPod or staring relentlessly into the face of a PSP is a teenager who isn't mooching around for money or whining unattractively about his lowly status in life. Similarly, an eight-year-old who's busy navigating the Nicktoons site on his own crank-powered lime-green laptop is one who isn't... well, I don't actually know what it is eight-year-olds do. They're not allowed past the entrance of the PGA Tour golf course on which I have my lavish yet tasteful home, and the guards have standing orders to escort any strays to the gatehouse. (I also have certain security measures in place.) Whatever it is, though, the world will be a better place with less of it going on. Quieter, certainly, and a good deal less sticky. So here's to the forward-thinking guys and gals of the MIT Media Lab, and a tip of Mr. Irresponsible's battered brown fedora. You geeks are okay with me.

Get Tazed, Pal

eBay has announced plans to block the sale and shipment of stun guns to customers in New York. With all due respect to eBay, and to New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who brokered the deal, this is exactly backwards. Mr. Irresponsible has been saying it for years: There is only one sensible policy for the distribution of stun guns in New York, and that is to give one to every man, woman and child in the state.

Consider the stun gun -- compact, non-lethal, supremely unpleasant. Now consider New York. Or, for the sake of this argument, let's just say New York City -- the world capital of finance, communications, and rudeness. My plan would do little to curb the excesses of the financial community or address the failings of the media. But when it comes to rudeness, which Mr. Irresponsible has studied the way some men study the sports page, the universal distribution of stun guns would be a downright panacea. Let's say you climb into the fetid back seat of a New York City taxi and the driver is blasting bouzouki music through a cheap boom box at just-barely-subsonic levels.  You ask him to turn it down, he ignores you, and you seethe straight through the short, miserable duration of your ride uptown. Now let's postulate that both you and the driver are armed with stun guns -- say, the $400 "Air Taser" described in this AP story, which can deliver a 50,000-volt wake-up call with the mere pull of a trigger. Spitzer alertly warns that "You wouldn't want these used in either illegal activities or horseplay," which is just the sort of joyless, schoolmarmy pronouncement you expect from someone who spends all day thinking about the law. And it's true, as far as it goes. But what about a situation like the one described above, in which you have a manners-based grievance and no real way to make it stick? Wouldn't it be convenient to be able to draw down on the offending driver in a safely non-fatal fashion? Wouldn't that at least get his attention? Under my plan the driver would himself be armed, which creates an instant equality and commonality of interests: Although he wants to be able to continue shredding the linings of his inner ears and you want merely to get to the dentist in relative peace, it is much more pressingly true that neither one of you wants to end up writhing in the gutter like a gaffed sea turtle. Thus equlibrated, the two of you have a mutual interest in compromise.  Perhaps the driver will modulate the volume. Perhaps you will learn to appreciate some of the subtleties of Mediterranean folk music.

Now imagine this little drama acted out across the length and breadth of New York City, from the farthest reaches of the Bronx down to the grassy slopes of Staten Island, from the winding streets of lower Manhattan all the way out to the distant precincts of Queens. That sound you hear is the gears of society groaning, it's humankind itself adjusting to the strange new notion that other people are affected by how loudly we play our music, how inconsiderately we bore our neighbors on the bus with our cell phone conversations, how assertively we shove and maneuver for space on a rainy sidewalk. And if somebody accidentally ends up on the receiving end of an incapacitating jolt of electricity, isn't that a small price for us to pay to reclaim the livability of the most magnificent city on earth? It's a glorious prospect -- Stun guns for all, and for all, a mannerly new future!

(Oh, by the way: When I say "us" I don't literally mean to include myself. I moved out of that hellhole years ago.)

Google This

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," according to Google itself. And this is a swell mission, except that it apparently doesn't apply to all information. Information about Google bigwigs, for example -- even fairly innocuous stuff and things that lie squarely in the public record -- well, the Goog would just as soon keep that kind of info to itself. According to News.com, Google took exception to reporter Elinor Mills using Google to gather some data on Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a story about how easy it is to use Google to Google people. Mills didn't publish the results of Schmidt's last prostate exam; she simply used the company's own search engine to gather up some nuggets like how much Schmidt pulled in selling his stock in the last two months (at least $50 million), that he's an amateur pilot, and that he attended Burning Man. This didn't sit so well with Google, which chose to retaliate by saying that it'll refuse to speak to News.com for the next year.

This brings us to today's manners lesson: Make irony your friend. If you're a big public company -- well, no, let's use a more accessible example. Let's say you're a private citizen, just some guy named Al. And let's say that you, Al, have made untold billions providing millions of computer users a comprehensive and efficient system for accessing information, and that a pesky reporter uses your own technology to access information about your CEO, and that this fairly innocent and common bit of journalistic methodology for some reason infuriates you (Al). How to punish her? Why, by withholding information! It's positively brilliant! And it isn't that you, Al, as an average guy, have corporate America's sociopathic need to control the agenda of any meeting in which you sit; it's just that you have a puckish sense of humor and really, really enjoy the madcap use of rhetorical devices! And by golly, the next time somebody pisses you off you might just whip some metonymy on 'em, or brush 'em back with some synecdoche, or -- whoa! -- even go all anadiplosis on 'em! Heeeaaah!

And Tell The Pepper Grinder To Keep It Down

An Italian company has announced plans to market a "talking wine label" -- in reality a small chip which would be implanted in wine bottles to dispense advice on "how to enjoy the wine, where it came from, everything you'd hear from a sommelier," says Tuscan entrepreneur Daniele Barontini. (Reuters fails to note whether Barontini twirled the tips of his walrus mustache and added an enthusiastic "Atsa-nice!", but let's just assume for the moment that he did.)

Mr. Irresponsible has heard some knuckleheaded ideas in his time, but this one takes the biscotti. Consider this: Wine is a social pleasure. Imagine the warm, glowy feeling you get from a nice bottle of Chianti. Imagine settling in with a group of companions to discuss the affairs of the day. Now imagine that the half-empty bottle adorning the table just won't shut up. It's "I can't believe you served me with that fish" and "Oof, I'm feeling a little corky tonight" and "Whoa, easy there, Guzzly; how about you gimme a nice sip once in a while?" Oh, you'll try to be polite and go on with your conversation, but the damn thing just will not be ignored. You think a Cabernet is assertive? Wait'll you sit down across from a talking '97 Rufina. Before long it'll be singing Neopolitan folk songs and leering at your date. And then, brother, you might as well signal for the waiter, because the evening is over. And don't expect the wine bottle to chip in, either. Oh no, you can count on one thing: The wine bottle will go dead, stony quiet when the check comes. It'll be humming innocently and pretending to be absorbed in the export information at the bottom of its label, and if that doesn't work it'll start whistling and craning its neck to study the ceiling tiles. You might as well just sign the check and head for the valet stand.

The prospects for this sort of thing are frightening to think about. You'll have Australian Shirazes bellowing out "Waltzing Matilda" in every liquor store, and German ice wines wheedling "Ach, is it cold in here or is it me?" Do you want to live in a world where every trip to the wine cellar is like some crazed, babbling Model UN? Not me, baby. So the next time you're presented with a glimmering gizmo and a New Age huckster who promises it'll change the very life you live, do as Mr. Irresponsible does and apply a simple test. Ask yourself this question: Is it likely to increase or decrease the amount of time you spend each day wanting to murder someone? If you can truthfully answer the latter -- as with, say, TiVo, or a really good toaster oven -- then by all means knock yourself out. But if you can't, run as far and fast as you can in the opposite direction.  And let the microchips fall where they may.

 

Can You Hear Me Now?

A magazine editor I know described the best thing about skydiving this way: "For a few minutes," he said wistfully, a tone coming into his voice some men use in describing the long-ago summer when they first experienced love, "I knew nobody could get me on the phone." This is why I don't own a cell phone: There are moments when I want to be absolutely inaccessible. In fact, given my general nature and the distrustful relationship between me and the rest of the species, I probably have many more of those moments than the average person. In fact, hang on -- I'm having one now!

I'm back.

The point is, you won't see Mr. Irresponsible riding the escalator at the mall, yammering loudly into a small hunk of plastic about his plans for the weekend. It isn't only that I don't wish to be reached when I'm riding the escalator at the mall, or, for that matter, the fact that I don't much care for the mall. It's also that there's an implicit assumption in this act which violates every tenet of good manners -- the assumption that one's every thought is so compelling that it needs to be broadcast to the immediate vicinity. This is the purest kind of narcissism. The vast majority of our thoughts during the day are for office use only. I'll sometimes find myself thinking "I wonder what ever happened to that guy who used to play the piano on the Dean Martin Show -- what was his name, Ken something?" Or "This gum doesn't have any flavor left. I better get rid of it pretty soon. I'll keep chewing it in the meantime, though." Or "Hey, that thing looks like that other thing I saw that time!" Do you see what I mean? You don't care about these thoughts. I barely care about them myself. But the average person with a cell phone seems to feel that the capability to express his inner monologue somehow equals an imperative to do so... and that means imposing it on anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot. (There is a corollary to this: People who talk on cell phones in crowded public spaces invariably do so at decibel levels approaching those of the average leaf blower.)

With that as background, I've been troubled over the last 24 hours to read two wire stories describing new cell phone-based stranger-disturbing technologies. The first will enable subscribers to watch vintage Looney Tunes cartoons on the screens of their mobile handsets. Forget for a moment  the grave disservice this does to the memory of animators like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, who poured endless hours of craft into each hand-inked frame of their seven-minute creations.  Here's a conversation I bet never happened:

Jones: "Man, I sure do hope people get to watch choppy broadcasts of these things on 2-by-2-inch screens someday!"
Avery: "You bet! Especially while they're driving!"

No, the real insult here is that the people offering the service don't actually intend for anyone to enjoy the cartoons at all -- they're simply being offered as one more shiny thing to mesmerize a back seat full of noisy kids into simmering down. "Industry observers," without whom Reuters would just have to stop writing entirely, have apparently dubbed this the "pass-back" phenomenon. ("Industry observers" just love the hell out of dubbing things, don't they?) In the UK, meanwhile, mobile users will soon be able to enjoy a phone-based version of Etch-a-Sketch. Which is good, because driving in London isn't terrifying enough -- you need that little extra soupçon of thrills you get from the guy behind you trying to draw a horsie with the "4" and "7" keys while maneuvering a huge Vauxhall sedan right up your tailpipe.

Mr. Irresponsible is no Luddite. I own a giant plasma TV, several Kevlar vests and the world's most powerful blender. But there ought to be a limit to the encroachment of technology, and it ought to be right at the margins of what I call the ZoPS™, or "Zone of Personal Selfishness." This is a theoretical space in which a person is entitled to be free of any real or imagined disturbances.  Everyone's ZoPS™ is constituted differently; mine is quite enormously large, comprising an area equal to the distance from my wet bar to the far side of the PGA Tour golf course on which I make my lavish yet tasteful home. Yours may well be smaller. But you have one and you are entitled to respect within its limits, and freedom from every yahoo with a Motorola flip phone and a tinnitus-inducing version of "Let's Get It Started" for a ring tone.  You are well within your rights to demand that respect of any person rude enough to violate your ZoPS™. And when he waves you off, as he is sure to do because he is deeply contemplating the tiny bowling game or teensy NFL highlights or minuscule unabridged version of "How The West Was Won" displayed on the screen before him, it is your right to drop him with a short right to the kidneys, shatter his kneecaps with a good swift kick and stomp the offending cell phone into the turf. Whatever you do, though, don't descend to his level of rudeness. When he moans that he's hurt and needs a doctor, by all means oblige him. Direct him politely to the nearest pay phone.