Analog Nation

Last year, in lieu of making New Year’s resolutions, I made a series of resolutions on behalf of the world in general. As January 1st bears down upon us once again, I have taken the liberty of crafting some more. You get to relax and stop trying to think up a good resolution, I get to shape the world in my twisted image, everybody wins.

Ready? Here we go.

I resolve, on your behalf, to stop expressing amazement at daylight saving time.

It never fails. Every year, the day after the clocks have “fallen back,” someone looks outside and says, “My goodness, it gets dark so early now!” Which, on paper, I agree with — the lost hour combined with autumn’s fading daylight has bumped up sunset’s curtain time. No question. But we as a nation have done this for 91 years. Why the crumbling hell are you still surprised? There has never been a year of your life in which this change has not happened. Getting bummed that it’s dark, that I understand. Being shocked by that same fact? Sorry, you’re on your own. As far as I’m concerned, there are only two types of people allowed to express such feelings:

A) Those who fondly remember a time before we changed clocks (nonagenarians, centenarians, ageless beings of undeath, etc).
B) Those who recently moved from Hawaii or Arizona, the two states that do not observe daylight savings. And nobody leaves Hawaii, so that doesn’t even make sense.

I resolve, on your behalf, to stop making commercials that employ heavy use of eating/drinking noises.

I’m fighting decades of established advertising theory on this one, but hey, every revolution begins with a single shot. Advertisers assume that if we hear how unspeakably delicious their product is, we will form a visceral connection. They augment ads with sound effects to broadcast tastiness. When the guy eats the burger, we really hear him eat that burger, and when the girl drinks the beverage, we really hear her drink that beverage. Slight problem, though: Eating noises fill me with rage. My eye twitches with every bite, and I know I’m not alone. We are friendly fire casualties in the war between Coke and Pepsi. Crunching, slurping, chewing, swallowing. Horrible, horrible swallowing. (In the rough draft for this post, I actually left myself a note here: “Try to make that sound not pornographic.” Basically a fail, right?) Every time Madison Avenue brings in a Foley artist to make a food product “pop,” God tasers Linda McCartney.

What do you have against Linda McCartney, Madison Avenue?

I resolve, on your behalf, not to talk about Twitter with people who don’t use Twitter unless they ask first.

Look, this is not to say anything against Twitter. I’m on the Twitter. I like the Twitter. But Twitter is in a place right now that reminds me of where fantasy sports were ten years ago. Either you were directly involved, or had no earthly idea what it was or how it worked. There was no in-between. In 2000, I was in a play with a troglodyte of a man who happened to live in my neighborhood. Every night, I had to listen to him talk about his fantasy football team as the subway crawled from 28th Street to Astoria Boulevard. Even as a football fan, even as someone who likes stats, I could not possibly have cared less. Then a friend invited me to play, and within a year I had teams in multiple leagues. I didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, I poured it on my cereal and used it as hair product. The first time I caught myself talking about my fantasy team with an outsider, it hit me — Sweet Jesus, I have become the troglodyte.

I see the same thing happening today when a Twitter user brings up the subject. People’s eyes glaze over. They check their phones for messages, they glance at the appetizer table. They recognize someone across the room who may or may not be there. If they ask about it, that’s one thing, but if they don’t, save it for your followers.

With that in mind, this next resolution is only for Twitter users. The rest of you can skip ahead if you want.

I resolve, on your behalf, not to tweet questions about why things are trending.

It takes two seconds to click the hashtag. If you’re still not sure what it means, it has to do with one of the Jonas Brothers’ birthdays.

I resolve, on your behalf, to let go of the whole thing where technically a decade starts with 1 and ends with 0.

Certain people get bent out of shape about this, and I suppose I might seem like one of them, considering that “Science!” is the biggest tag in my cloud. However, this is one instance where “practical” kicks “technically” in the ass. The argument goes like this: There was no Year Zero, so the very first decade consisted of 1 AD through 10 AD. By extension, the 1980s technically started in 1981 and ended in 1990, despite the fact that “Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em” officially launched the horrors of early 90s fashion that February. The 90s technically ended in 2000, the 21st century started in 2001, and next year completes our current decade (which for some reason we still have not named). Everyone knows one smartass who brings this up, sometimes with a note of disbelief that the rest of us can’t grasp the concept. We understand math, smartass. Do the 1980s mind that we borrowed 1990 to complete the box set? As far as I can tell, the practice of labeling a decade’s identity began last century. Before that, things just didn’t move quickly enough for one decade to be significantly different from another. So why not make it official? Let’s claim the year 1900 as part of the 20th century. The 19th century had only 99 years. Any objections? No? Good. The 21st century therefore began on Y2K, and 2009 is, in fact, the last year of this decade.

This one pains me, but I have to do it. I resolve, on your behalf, to stop saying “awesome.”

We need to have a Viking funeral for the word. It has served with distinction, bringing honor to us all. But its time has come. Its own ubiquity has rendered it meaningless, even in the detached usage we have come to know and love. That plate of bacon over there? That’s a plate of awesome. Louis C.K.’s last HBO special? Sixty minutes of awesome. Zombies? Awesome. Chuck Norris? Completely awesome. We’ve taken it as far as it can go. It’s the “groovy” of the … decade we just finished (dammit, we really need a name for this thing). Hey, I’m as guilty as anyone. Do not mistake my call to action for a denouncement. Not to go all one-hand-clapping on you, but awesome is awesome. I’m not even sure we can extricate it from our vocabulary. It may not be possible.

In fact, hang on a second …

I resolve, on your behalf, to reduce incidence of the word “awesome” to 150 parts per million (PPM) by the year 2035.

Much better. The only way to go about this is to approach it like air pollutant reduction. We have to set a target level and work together to reach it. We can’t just lock ourselves in a room and sweat out the withdrawal pains. Oh sure, we’ll be clean for a while, but that never ends well. When we inevitably fall off the wagon, the crash will be even harder than before. “Awesome” will be the only adjective we say at all. Other languages will sadly shake their heads and turn their backs on us. They offered us help, and we took their money. We will have burned them for the last time.

So let’s start making a change today. We can build a cleaner tomorrow, one sentence at a time. And that, my friends, will be awes- … sorry, habit. That will be fantastic.

(Note: The above constitutes a legally binding document, and by reading it you agree to carry out all provisions therein, including the ones from last year.)

Analog Nation is pleased to present our predictions for the first year of the second decade of the third millennium — and beyond.

• Financial markets in Europe will grind to a halt due to a toothpaste shortage in Finland.
The world economy will once again teeter on disaster’s edge.

• Tectonic activity will cause major geological changes in the Great Lakes region, including a new volcano in Detroit.
Because really, what else can go wrong for them?

• The words “chimney,” “fulcrum,” and “hand-me-down” will come to be seen as unspeakably filthy.
Linguists will have to think up replacement words, which will be particularly tricky for chimney because “smokestack” is already a little dirty.

• The United States Supreme Court will relocate its chambers to a floating castle that drifts along the Capital Beltway.
This one just makes sense, and probably should have happened by now.

• Broncos legend John Elway will discover the lost city of Atlantis.
The “how” won’t be nearly as surprising as the “why.”

• The governors of at least seven states will turn out to be covert assassins.
The ensuing media storm will be called “Assassingate,” because we have lost the ability to come up with scandal names.

• Someone will show up at Oscars wearing a dress made entirely of leaves.
The Golden Globes will also happen, apparently.

• The National Hockey League will merge with Major League Soccer, creating a soccer-hockey hybrid called “kickpuck.”
Within minutes, children in Canada will be born with a natural ability to play the game.

• Opera mashups will sweep the Internet
Lady Gaga, we’re looking at you.

• The Prime Minister of Australia will lose a bet with the President of Portugal, forcing the populations of those countries to switch places.
Sooner or later we’ll guess right on this — and who will be laughing then, editors of Prognostication Monthly?

COMPLETELY ACCURATE BONUS: THE DECADE AHEAD

• By the end of 2018, nearly all birds will be able to speak Norwegian.
This won’t be as unsettling as it sounds.

• Cal Tech will clone Abraham Lincoln, including his memories and personality.
The project’s lead geneticists will be forced to file a restraining order against Doris Kearns Goodwin.

• To combat inflation, prices will be capped at five dollars.
Nothing, anywhere, will cost more than five dollars.

• Retailers will introduce DRM-encrypted physical items that disappear after a set amount of time.
Everyday necessities such as chairs, socks, garbage cans, etc. will be licensed, not sold.

• The 2016 presidential election will be settled with a jai-alai match between Kathleen Sebelius and Tim Pawlenty.
The winner will be revealed in the December 2015 edition of “Completely Accurate Predictions.”

Grade for our 2009 predictions: Solid B+ (We were close with the John McEnroe thing, but should have said Tiger Woods.)

Analog Nation presents the Twenty Best Lists of 2009:

1. Top 10 Reality Show Knife-Fights of 2009 — Access Hollywood
2. Top 10 2009 Corporate Decisions That Came Close to Not Losing Money — BusinessWeek
3. Top 8 2009 Media Trends Your 15-Year-Old Doesn’t Have to Explain to You — TechCrunch
4. Top 2 American Automobiles of 2009 — Car & Driver
5. Top 5 Ill-Advised Professional Rodeo Clown Comebacks of 2009 — Cowboy Sports News
6. Top Animal-Related Celebrity Arrests of 2009 — Wall Street Journal
7. Top 12 Extra-Solar Non-Planetoid Orbital Body Discoveries of 2009 — Astronomy
8. Top Microbrew Launches of 2009 — The Oregonian (65-page special report)
9. 2009′s Top 7 Vaguely Racist Myths About Swine Flu — USA Today
10. Top 250 Horrific Injuries of 2009: The Year in Pictures — Sports Illustrated
11. 2009′s Most Important Developments in City Zoning Legisl-OMG KITTIES! — Cat Fancy
12. Top 5 Moves in the Hotel Laundry Sector That You Didn’t Think Were Going to Pay Off (But Did) — Journal of the American Association of Hotel Laundry Technicians
13. Top 5 Moves in the Hotel Laundry Sector That You Thought Were Going to be a Sure Thing (But Missed Badly) — Journal of the American Association of Hotel Laundry Technicians
14. Top 10 Viral Videos of 2009 — New England Journal of Medicine
15. 2009 Top 20 Straight-to-DVD Movies That Were Actually Kinda Okay — Missives From Mother’s Basement (A Condé Nast publication)
16. Top 10 Things You Searched For In 2009 (Not “You” as in Collectively, “You” as in Specifically YOU) — Google, Inc. press release
17. Top 1,000 Most Banal Facebook Status Updates of 2009 — Time
18. Top 25 Things Oprah Did — O Magazine
19. Top Lists About Lists of 2009 — List Fancy (Our list made #7!)
20. People of the Year — Person Monthly

Some of you may have heard that the Internet recently marked its fortieth anniversary. Technically this is true — the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet) established the first link between distant computers in late 1969. It’s kind of like saying that television is sixty-five million years old because that’s when the dinosaurs were wiped out, but whatever. The Internet is forty. Like any proud parent, DARPA (similar to ARPA, but with a “D”) celebrated with some balloons and a suitcase full of cash.

Wow, they’re all, uh … right there. Great scavenger hunt, guys.

The balloons were the centerpiece of an experiment, designed to test how accurately information spreads on the Internet. This past weekend, DARPA officials positioned ten red weather balloons at undisclosed locations around the country. The first group to correctly report the coordinates of all ten balloons would win forty thousand dollars. One person couldn’t possibly stumble upon all ten balloons, so online communication would have to be the key. The winner was a team from MIT, who will presumably be using the money to pay for World of Warcraft subscriptions and prank-related liquid nitrogen.

Look, we here at Analog Nation are not here to tell DARPA how to do their jobs. (If we were, we’d be demanding more hoverponies.) But if DARPA really wanted to know whether information travels accurately via the Internet, we could have saved them forty grand and ten balloons.

Here’s how it works:

• Someone sees one of the balloons, takes photo on a cell phone, and uploads it to Facebook.
• A friend sees the photo, comments on it, and adopts a duck for his farm.
• The friend’s friends see the comment and join the conversation.
• A three-degrees-removed friend sees another balloon, but misses the Facebook conversation because her News Feed is out of order and her Live Feed is too long.
• #Redballoons starts to trend on Twitter.
• Wired posts a “How-To Wiki” on coordinating balloon hunts.
• The BalloonFinder app goes live on iTunes.
• #Redballoons tops the trend ranking on Twitter, fueled mostly by tweets like “LOL whut’s redballoons?” and “#redballoons #redballoons #redballoons #redballoons.”
• A video of a red balloon gets half a million views on YouTube, though it’s unclear whether it’s one of DARPA’s.
• YouTube videos recording people’s reactions to the balloon video get well over fifteen million combined views.
• A giant red balloon appears in Second Life, and is immediately pelted with winged genitalia.
• Reddit and Digg vote up balloon-related stories. Slashdot looks on from afar with sad eyes.
• BalloonLocator, a competing app, gets stuck in approval hell at Apple and launches on Android Market instead.
• iPhone vs. Droid flame wars overrun Wired’s balloon wiki.
• Omigod you guys, kitties!
• Blogs start to cross-pollinate posts about the contest, creating a Möbius strip that has neither beginning nor end.
• TMZ breaks a story claiming that all ten balloons have been found.
• CNN begins to report the TMZ story as news. Fox and MSNBC polarize the issue and initiate a red/blue feedback loop.
• The true location of the balloons is forever obscured and can never determined, as one half of the country believes one thing and the other half believes the exact opposite.
• This happens.
• Pale nerds at MIT hack DARPA’s website and find the balloons’ exact coordinates without having seen a single one, winning forty thousand dollars.
• My mom forwards me the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe urban legend email from 1998.

There you go, DARPA. That’s what forty years has wrought.

On Monday, December 1st, the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines on endorsement transparency go into effect. This is the first time the FTC has updated these rules in nearly thirty years, which means that the rules A) are old enough to have been disappointed by the “Star Wars” prequels, and B) probably love zombies. The most notable additions to the guidelines are §§ 255.0, 255.1, and 255.5 — language that specifically includes bloggers and other online entities. We here at Analog Nation wanted to take this opportunity to fully disclose all promotional considerations.

The Analog Nation home page is sponsored by Gap, Inc. This holiday season, let your loved ones know precisely how much you care by showing them where they fall on the gift spectrum:

Old Navy™ (meh) << The Gap™ (getting warmer) << Banana Republic™ (now we’re talking)

When writing each week’s “Completely True Fact,” I get my creative juices flowing with the help of some Eclipse™ Winterfrost© gum and a nice glass of Tropicana™ Pure Premium© grapefruit juice. They taste disgusting together, but that actually helps me focus.

Speaking of focus, Analog Nation’s tag cloud is made possible by Novartis, makers of Ritalin®. On those harrowing days when I am unable to get my hands on some Ritalin®, the tag cloud is made possible by can after can of Red Bull™.

Our archives are funded by a charitable grant from Anheuser-Busch InBev, whose products improve my ability to operate heavy machinery (results not typical).

As always, we extend hearty and continuing thanks to Kellogg NA, owners of The Keebler Company, who owns Sunshine Biscuits, who keeps sending us palettes of Cheez-It® for no real reason. It appears to be some sort of clerical error, but we are so not complaining.

Lastly, this post itself was sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC:™ Since 1914, America’s #1 Source for Federal Trade Regulations.©®”

Earth’s salvation rests in a display case on the Upper West Side. It is a cloth, somewhere between a rug and a shawl, with long, wispy tassels. A dizzying pattern weaves up and down its length, the work of many hands. It is a nearly perfect shade of gold. Dozens of pins hold the cloth down, their heads hidden snugly within the thread. The display case stands waist-high, angled like an architect’s drafting table, covered in spotless glass. Yet the case with its golden cloth is a side attraction in this lobby, dominated by a massive Native American canoe that hangs from the ceiling. At first glance, the cloth doesn’t look like something that might save the human race. That may sound like lofty expectations for a rug, but this particular rug happens to be the only known piece of fabric in the world to have been woven from spider silk.

That’s right, my friends. This is a spidergoat thing.

Analog Nation has chronicled the spidergoat menace a couple of times, tracing a direct line from the pursuit of spider silk to the charred end of civilization. The short version is this: A) Spider silk kicks ass. B) Spiders are impossible to farm. C) The biotech sector is working on a way to genetically combine spiders with goats, so that silk proteins can be harvested from the goats’ milk. D) The spidergoats will become sentient and rise as one to cast off the yoke of humanity. E) Apocalypse. Whether we realize it or not, we are in a race to develop artificial spider silk before the spidergoats unleash their Day of Darkness, like a cross between Skynet and the Matrix, but with hooves. And fangs. Horrible, horrible fangs.

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