Archive for January, 2005

Got cognac?

…for the 56th time, a man stole into a downtown graveyard early on Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday and placed three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac on the writer’s grave.

Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, who has seen the mysterious visitor every Jan. 19 since 1976, and about 20 people he invited, gathered in the clear, cold night to glimpse the ritual.

“It was absolutely frigid,” Jerome said of the sub-20 degree temperature.

The visitor arrived at 1:10 a.m., and was wearing a heavy coat, and obscured his face with what appeared to be a black pullover, he said.

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Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of living in a Google world. Yes, I know that the folks at Google are the veritable search engine darlings of the day and I’m likely to be met with a bright flash of lightning for even daring to challenge their pristine greatness. Yet, I press on. It may be a simple case of oversaturation, but do we really need to be reading about Google in every magazine and newspaper every time one of their employees blows their nose? Do I really need to see every word remotely similar to “Google” dressed up in their primary colored font craziness? Is there nothing else happening in the business or technology sectors that Google’s become the new Kevin Bacon and we must find out how many degrees of Googlosity everything holds? Aside from the pomposity that Google prances around with, we now must endure such Google-related frivolities as “googlism.com” or “googlewhack.com”. Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Being entranced by the behavior of a search engine? Is this the life you envisioned for yourself or your children? Your children’s children?

I can hear the defense — “Oh but they’re socially conscious! Oh but they are for free-trade, open source and boxer-briefs!” Save it for the jury, panderers, I want nothing to do with it!

I’m more than just a little bit tired of it. I’m tired of the “aren’t we so great, we’re going to scan in every book ever made!” Tired of the “look at us we have the entire history of the internet and cute little seasonal logos”. La tee freaking dah! I’m tired of the excessive news coverage and fawning and the ” you can’t hate us because we’re Google and the word google is cool and hip”. Earth to Google — the word is “googol” but that wasn’t cool and hip enough for you, was it? Do we need another place for email? When we already have 100 yahoo and hotmail accounts we never use?

I think it’s a little disheartening how impatient we’ve become. Whatever happened to just visiting your local psychic? Climbing to the nearest mountain peak and finding enlightenment the old-fashioned way? Looking something up in the encylopedia? Do you want encyclopedia salesmen to go hungry, Google? Is that what you really want? In your quest to become so rapidly genericized in every day language, you must throw innocent information professionals out on the street? Well I, for one, am not going to stand for it. I renounce thee, Google, and your sponsored links and your thinly veiled pornographic image searches! The day you replace my brain with one of your cold yellow search boxes is the day you’ll find my carcass in the grave, I say!

I really have to ask — why, in this day and age, are people still faxing? Why on God’s green Earth are people still putting fax numbers on business cards, asking you to fax documents or asking if you have a fax number on any number of various and sundry forms and applications? WHO HAS A FAX NUMBER? Not me, that’s for damn sure. Oh sure, I know you can receive faxes by email or some such nonsense — but the question is why? WHY? Why, when there are so many other easier and cleaner ways of receiving information and documents, would you decide “oh hey, I know — let me fax it to you.”? I’m sure I’ll get a deluge of protests from all my readers (2) telling me that faxing is reliable, efficient, legally binding, blah blah blah — I’m not buying it and deep down, I really don’t think you do either.

In case you haven’t realized, the fax machine is like the bag phone of the document sharing world. It’s the 8-track tape of sending information. I’m not sure why so many people have failed to get the memo — perhaps they’re waiting on someone to fax it to them?

They’ll be waiting a good long while, because the truth of the matter is I could manufacture my own paper, write out the document with quill and ink, seal it in an envelope and put it in a tube attached to a carrier pigeon and it would still get to you before I ever drag my ass down to a fax machine.