Apple’s keynotes are getting awkward…

I started writing this the day after the keynote was downloadable on iTunes, but alas, I had to come back to it later (now) because I felt my thoughts were rushed and emotional.  Surprise, I’m a Gemini.  Instead of a big rant, I decided to go bullet-point style.  Here you go:  What was awkward about Apple during the iPhone 5 Keynote.

• The 26 seconds it took for the keynote video to actually start.

I’ve never noticed Apple do this.  It’s a recorded event, and it’s edited and put online for download.  So, we needed 26 seconds of silence in the beginning?  Awkward…

• Tim Cook:  “We’ve got some really cool stuff to show you…” (Pause for applause/whooping/hollering)

And there was none.  I may have heard a breeze and seen some olde tyme tumbleweed though.  Steve Jobs would never have allowed such an uncomfortable silence.  He would have marched on, not giving a crap whether anyone took the applause bait.  Awkward…

• Tim said it’s “an extraordinary time” at Apple.

Why?  Such strange verbiage being used by Apple PR since Steve Jobs passed away.  “Resolutionary”, “Completely renanoed”, “Engineered for maximum funness.” – What?  Still, that’s just the silly stuff, this was serious.  What is so extraordinary?  The engineering feat that is the iPhone 5?  As far as I’m concerned, this is ordinary for Apple.  Why not point that out and boldly state, “This is an ordinary time for Apple.” and explain why.  Morning headlines made.  Boom.

• The store in Barcelona.

Tim says it’s on the Passeig de Gracia – in Barcelona.  Yeah, you said that.  Again, Steve would never do this.  It’s a tiny oddity, but a glaring one since we’re used to year after year of listening to Steve Jobs deliver perfectly timed presentations.  Tim clearly stuttered here and wasn’t following the “script” as it were.  Poor form.

• Limestone from a local quarry.  “No one would have done this but Apple.”

More on the Barcelona store, and this just came of as pretentious and unnecessary.  A kind of “This is what we do, isn’t it cool?  It’s still cool, right guys?” comment.  No, Tim, it’s not still cool because everyone does that kind of shit now.  Tone it down a notch.

Lastly, I think we’ve had enough of the videos of store launches.  They’re all the same.  We get it.  Lines of clapping employees, catchy music, shots of trendy and not-so-trendy people living in unity, etc.  There’s no need for this to take up keynote time.

But obviously, there was a need.  Not enough keynote content to fill with iPhone 5, iOS 6 and iPods?  Also, usually Apple uses pretty fringe artists and music for these videos.  They’re known for finding interesting groups and bringing them to the forefront with their commercials and the like.  This time jumped right to a wildly popular band and used their number one hit with Imagine Dragons’ single, “It’s Time.”  The whole thing had more of a “Look what our video editing department can do!” feel rather than needing to show off the  “special” store opening.  But guys, don’t forget to clap afterwards.  Awkward…

• Mac sales:  Apple notebooks are the new #1 in the U.S.

Do we need to keep doing the Mac vs PC thing?  Can’t we move on to just referring to Apple’s notebooks and computers as Apple computers?  I get that this goes hand in hand with Apple’s quest to be “special” and “fringe” or even a little cool-kids-club like, but I think the company and the image people have of it has grown up considerably over the last 10 years to the point that this mentality is no longer necessary.  It’s just awkward…

• iPhone 5 rises out of the stage floor.

I won’t spend much time on this “bit” because it was self-degrading and doesn’t need my help much.  Just what the fuck?  Was it supposed to be funny?  Even when it started rotating after Schiller said, “It is an absolute jewel.” the crowd couldn’t help but chuckle.  So incredibly awkward.

• Taller screen, taller apps.

Updated apps like Keynote, Pages, all take advantage of the taller display.  Yeah, it’s taller.  That’s cool.  Clearly just a quick chance to remind you about these apps existing at all.  The third party previews of both CNN and OpenTable were ridiculous.  Nowhere in those 4″ updates was there any added functionality that was hard to implement in the 3.5″ versions solely because of the 3.5″ screen.  They just updated shit and made it prettier, which is nice, but don’t pass it off to us like it’s a revolution in what can be done with an iPhone screen.

iPhone 5 Prediction

Just getting this out of the way since it’s the thing to do for me this time of year.

4 or 4.1 inch display this year.  Thinner, with an in-cell touch panel from LG as opposed to a two-layer touch panel/LCD.
A new dock connector.  Say goodbye to tons of old accessories and radio docks unless they thought ahead and provide some sort of converter.  This will be this years big drama.
LTE.

No major redesign.  Maybe thinner because of the in-cell panel, but this Dieter-Ram mockup that’s been making the rounds for the past year just isn’t happening.
Possibly a power optimized A5X chip from the iPad, but no 802.11ac WiFi, no NFC, and no T-Mobile deal.

I’ll say a release on Sept. 21st, Oct. 5th at the latest.

So there’s my bullshit.
Thanks for playing.

I have to get back to writing…  Again.

Happiness, Part 2: Lost & Found

There are those people, and we become them from time to time, who are jealous of others’ happiness.  It’s understandable, the jealousy, because we allwantto be happy.  So it’s natural that when someone else, especially someone we know, is happy and we are not.  It’s similar when someone we know is unhappy.  Obviously we don’t wish for their unhappiness upon us, but it may ache to know it’s there.  Jealousy isn’t so bad, but envy is a real bitch.

See, the difference is that jealousy takes place with something you can attain.  If you can be happy, you’re just jealous.  Envy, on the other hand, takes places when happiness is unattainable.  If you simply can never be happy, you are envious.  You’re wishing to have something that others have and harbor anger because you can’t have it.

I think this is a big grey area though.  If you have a chance at happiness, you’re going to take it.  You have to.  But what if that chance requires ruining someone else’s chances?  Of course, I’m talking about love, lost & found.

One can become envious of happiness in the worst way if they fail to shift the focus of their happiness when the time comes.  We all find and lose love and happiness, but the trick to keeping at it is to recognize when one opportunity has ended and another has begun.  When we fail to recognize these changes, we can become stonefooted.  Denial and doubt are terribly uncomfortable things.  We think we can fix things.  There’s no way it is the way it is.

It is what it is.  One of my favorite sayings.  It’s so simple and pointed.  Pithy, even.  It’s so true.  If you lose happiness or lose a love, it is what it is.  You can fight for remnants of that happiness if they exist, and possibly hope to build upon them, but in most cases these pieces, if they exist at all, are broken.  It’s like dropping a piece of fine China.  Just because you can put it back together with glue and whatnot doesn’t mean it’ll be the same thing.  In the end, it’s broken and it’s time to get a new plate.  Those who dwell on what’s lost are those who miss out on what’s next.

The other difficulty comes in where we have the ability to make others happy.  If your ability to do this is either diminished or nonexistent because of other things getting in the way, then so be it.  There’s a need to concentrate on oneself and make you happy.  The idea that you can’t make others happy until you’re happy with yourself is terribly true.  Those who failed making someone else happy usually have themselves to blame.  We often take for granted the good things in life and sometimes that includes great people.  We assume that just because we’ve got them in our lives that they’re a permanent fixture and we can concentrate on other things, or just relax.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  Giving your heart and soul to someone is a constant event.  You do not simply give it and walk away.  If you’ve got it to give, you have to give it every day, and you have to mean it.

There’s something special about happiness derived this way, from another.  You have a sense that you know you’re feeding off of each other.  One happiness, one love, for another.  They drive each other every day and get stronger with each other.  It’s incredible to experience, and if you’d think that being happy with yourself is difficult, rare, and great, then imagine sharing that between two incredible people.  You know at any point during the day that you have someone who would do for you as you would do for them.  Having someone to call your own, to lay your head with, to be the last warmth you feel that day in your arms as you slip to redundantly dream of them, only to awake hours later and have them be the first warmth of your day…

That, beyond any happiness within yourself, is the greatest feeling in the world, and that’s love.

This is nothing to take lightly.  This doesn’t get taken for granted.
This should be loved as much as it is, itself, love.  It is something to be held onto tightly with a grip that’s firm and sure.
Because only a fool would grip so loose.  And if only fools fall in love, then I feel I have it right by saying the better men don’t fall after all but find it themselves.  They catch it, they keep it sacred, and they never let it go.

(PS. I miss you.)

Happiness, Part 1: A Duality of Catfish

This may be one of those things that certain people understand how to do at some point in life because of chance, or because they tried their damnedest to.  I am in the latter group.  It’s a heavy subject:  Finding and maintaining happiness.  Let’s get existentialist, shall we?

Let me start with Catfish and the deeply effective quote I got from it.  Catfish, in short, is a fake documentary about a guy who gets to know a little girl on Facebook when they correspond about a painting she did of a photograph he published.  He ultimately winds up speaking to her older half-sister and begins a romantic involvement from afar.  This goes down a wild set of twists and turns that ends with him going to Michigan to meet her for the first time.  I won’t ruin it, but it doesn’t end well, and it’s sad.

Here’s the quote:

They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with this idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them. And the catfish would keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes, they keep you guessin’ they keep you thinkin’ they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish, because we would be dull and boring if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.

The quote itself is fantastic by itself, but who would I be if I didn’t expand on it with my own thoughts?  I’d be boring, and you’d stop reading, and we’d both be lesser people for it.

See, I have a catfish in my life.  I thank the stars every day for her because without her, I wouldn’t write this.  There’s a lot I might not do.  There are certain things I know to be likely occurences in my life now, and they were pretty up in the air before, and I feel the same goes for my catfish.  I want to be a catfish right back.  Even though for us to both be each other’s catfish we’d have to trade off transforming into cod… but that’s weird, and it’s really taking away from the metaphor.

Happiness is a tricky concept.  I think most people mess up happiness because they think it’s supposed to be a singular state of being, or a standalone feeling you have.  It’s really interesting to write this at this exact moment too, because I have such a unique grasp of happiness.  See, I’m at work and there’s nothing to do, so that sucks.  My hands are so cold that I can’t feel the keys beneath them, I have to go to the bathroom but I’m inexplicably focused and driven to write right now, so I’m terribly uncomfortable, and I have things to be stressed about like money.  Plenty of bills to pay, and not enough income for it all.  Add to this that I’m overweight, have terribly unsightly damage to repair on my car, have a tumultuous relationship with my father who just decided to call me directly at work to grumble that I have stuff to pick up from his apartment, and that song Holy Touch just came on the radio.  First-world problems abound.

Beyond any of this, I’m happier right this minute than I ever thought I could be in the quarter-century before it, and it’s all because of perspective.  I know that there may not be much to do at work at the moment, but I have my writing to pass my time.  I know once I leave work and get outside I won’t be so cold.  I just took a break in between sentences to hit the bathroom.  I know my financial woes will balance out because in the end, if they don’t, I’ll wind up dead and I like trying to avoid that.  I hear it sucks.  I’m not obese and I can and will easily drop any excess weight I don’t like on me.  I can fix most of the damage to my car pretty soon and on the other guy’s dime, not to mention that it’s a damn car and it’s just a thing.  At least it runs.  My father is a pain in the ass and he’s known to be the way he is.  I love him anyway.  Oh, and that song is over and I’m now listening to Oasis.  Even though it’s Don’t Look Back in Anger, I’m already thinking about my Wonderwall and find myself filled top to bottom with happiness, her favorite smirk worn on my face as I write this.

I feel that without my catfish, I might sit still on these things that weigh on me.  They’d weigh, and I might break.  I can’t say that my catfish that keeps me moving now is responsible for everything I do.  That’d be a little over the top.  I can say, however, that without this catfish having swam along into my life, I wouldn’t have the push to do as much as I have the capacity to.

I’m able to say that I have a somebody in my life that not only happens to take that role, but wants to on a daily basis.
I have a somebody that motivates to the point of self-discovery.
I have a somebody that gives beyond their possessions.
I have a somebody that loves in a way that rivals great fiction.
I have a somebody that’s genuinely happy, and I’m a part of that.
Most importantly, I have a somebody that makes me genuinely happy in return.

It’s important to recognize, when and if one finds it, how you came upon your particular happiness.  This is what allows us to not only have found it in the first place, but also know how to maintain and care for it.  Happiness is not something that is attained and kept easily.  It must be cared for, monitored, protected, played with, fed, kept warm and safe.  It’s not far from how you yourself need to be maintained.

Happiness will be as good as the care you give it, and with a catfish to keep you moving, there’s no reason to let it slip.

$490,000 buys me a soapbox!

Oh, the unrelenting outrage.  Check this out.

This, in case you can’t tell on first glance, is a chart depicting the current salaries for the entirety of the Phollying Phillies.  None other than Mr. Clifford Lee, listed right underneath that guy with the flimsy arm, is listed with a salary of $25,000,000.  That’s an imperial (fuck metric) shit-ton of money.  You’ll likely hear many Phillies fans exclaiming such obnoxiousisms as, “He makes 25 mil and hasn’t won a game!” or, “Lee is overpaid!” or my personal favorite, “This old guy next to me at CBP keeps talking about this Schmidt guy. (shrug)”

You’ll hear the last one because there’s a good reason a Twitter account called @fansince09 exists, but the first two are my newest annoyance in all of baseball, but greater than that, in sports today.

It’s this whole idea that a player is expected to play to the “expectations” of his salary.  All.  The.  Time.  This morning, the late morning boys on WFAN were discussing Mark Teixeira.  Caller after caller, outraged that he dare play the way he has been considering he makes an obscene amount of money as a Yankee, moaned on and on to these hosts who placated them, one by one.  This was the point at which I decided to switch to music.

Here’s the thing:  Playing baseball, or any similar sport for that matter, isn’t like working a desk job.  Weird, right?  I know.  Apparently, from the in-depth reasearch I’ve done (lies), baseball is a sport that involves quite a bit of variable when considering a player’s performance.  Things like a player’s sleep the night before, the weather, stress, date-rape, bad umpires, headaches, scurvy, ballpark distractions, R.A. Dickey being on the mound, etc.  They all play heavily into how one may perform on the field.  Some more common than others, but the point remains.  Just because you’ve proven you can play well enough to warrant an outrageous salary, and your team gave it to you, does not mean that you should be expected to deliver all the time.

I underlined the most important part here.  I’d get the outrage if these players forced these teams at gunpoint to hand over numbers like $25m, but come on.  I won’t get into a rant about how sports worldwide have gotten to the point of absurdity with the amount of money players are paid, but if Brian Cashman decided to give Mark Teixeira what he gets paid, then what is Teixeira to do when he has a bad month?  Even a bad season?  Give some of it back?  Donate a chunk of it to charity?  Give it to you?

It comes down to this.  Cliff Lee is a phenomenal pitcher.  That hasn’t changed.  He’s having a crap season.  Guess what!  The entire team is having a crap season.  This team we watched win the World Series in 2008 is currently in the process of cleaning house to start from prospect-scratch.  Guess what else!  Cliff Lee and his team signed a contract.  It dictated that he receive $25m for his services.  That’s all.  It doesn’t say that if he pitches like garbage or doesn’t come up with wins that he doesn’t get that much money, because that’s not how sports contracts work.  Would that make more sense?  Maybe it would.  Maybe we can get to the point where we have conditional contracts for players that says if certain stats arent at certain minimum criteria, they take a pay cut.

It doesn’t really matter though.  In the end, he makes his money and you have an armchair from which to grumble through your mouth full of puffed Cheetos to no one, because no one can hear you.  You’re alone in your living room, watching SportsCenter, complaining about this crap because that’s what you do.  Maybe you’re a broadcaster though.  At least then you have a reason to drone on about this.  I’m sure your producers picked up from the trending #SetLeeFree that people are upset he can’t catch a win this season.  Because this season is over right?  He went 0-25 or something right?  That hashtag is real right?  No, of course not on all counts. 

Cliff Lee goes and plays baseball, goes out with his teammates to awesome dinners, goes home and fucks his wife, plays with his kids and his two dogs, probably drives a cool Land Rover, and is ecstatic about it.  Know why?  Because whether it’s because of this country, the sport of baseball, or people like us, he is allowed to go winless and still make 25 large.

It’s not the players’ fault here.  It’s the state of the business today.  Notice I didn’t say sport?  This isn’t about the sport part, it’s about the business.  Because you’re not upset he’s pitching like star reliever of the New York Yankees, Chad Qualls.  No, you’re pissed because he makes an amount of money for throwing a ball that you can’t even picture in your head in actual printed bills.  So the first time a player like this underperforms, you have to go off about how much money he makes like that’s some sort of legal obligation that he have an 0.91 ERA all year.  Well allow me to leave you with one more little nugget.  See that chart up there?  Take a look at the MLB minimum.  That’s 490,000 God forsaken dollars.  The average of us makes that, divided by ten.  That’s the league minimum.

Yeah, shut up.
#wrongcomplaint

Pitching and Cheating

Well it’s about time I wrote about baseball.  For fuck sake I spend enough time reading about it, you’d think I’d plaster my blog with some original thought on the matter sometimes.  This is mostly going to be about cheating in general, but forgive me for having a passion for pitching and possibly getting on a bit of a tirade about it’s relation to that position.

This came up last night when I was tweeting (thanks for starting that addiction, AJS) about Davey Johnson.  Google the incident because I’m too lazy to explain it all, but basically he called out Rays Pitcher Joel Peralta for having pine tar in his glove in last night’s game, got the pitcher ejected, and Peralta will likely be suspended and fined once they investigate the glove to find out if it’s maple or spruce, or something… I don’t know.

Anyway, you’d think today we’d have 712 articles (that’s a scientific calculation, fuck you very much) about Joel Peralta, right?  I mean, articles centered on the guy and what he did and how terrible it is and why it’s wrong and and and… but no.  Instead, we have 711 (Mike Vorkunov overslept. Read: Doesn’t give a shit) articles about Davey Johnson and how he’s some sort of tattle-tale.

Can I ask a serious question?  Are we all fucking serious?  I hope not, but I feel like what’s happening here is that everyone but me is legitimately taking the position that weighing a baseball with spit, pine tar, a steel ball insert (look it up, it never happened) or whatever is okay as long as it’s not caught?

Okay, let’s step back for a second.  Let me give you a hypothetical:

Let’s say we have the Yankees promptly losing to the Mets this weekend.  It’ll happen, watch.  So, R.A. “One-Hit-Wonder” Dickey (credit for the nickname: me) is doing his thing.  Let’s hypothetically say that Dickey used to play for the Yankees.  In fact, let’s even go as far as to say he pitched on the same lineup as Joe Girardi.  Wacky idea #19?  Let’s say Girardi used to catch him.  So Girardi happens to remember that back in the day, Dickey liked to weigh his knuckleball with pine tar.  It was in Girardi’s favor to win then, so he didn’t say anything about it.  But now?  Memory serves him well and this weekend, knowing R.A. probably mucked up a ball or two, Girardi has the umpire check his glove.  Eureka, pine tar.  Ejection.  Suspension.  Dogs and cats living together.  Mass hysteria.

Here’s where I’ll tell you the truth in this hypothetical.  I’d be furious with Dickey and probably never respect him as a pitcher ever again.  I’m an enormous Mets fan and always will be, but as deep as my love for this franchise or the sport in general goes, it’ll never go deep enough to say that cheating is okay.

I don’t give a shit if what Davey Johnson did was snitching.  I’ve heard the old saying, “Snitches get stitches.” a million times and you know what?  This snitch isn’t going to get stitches, and if this were game 7 of the World Series and this cheating pitcher would have won the game on his BS, this snitch would be in line for a fitting for a ring.

There have been loads of seasons for many teams in which the ability to play October baseball was determined by a single game during the regular season.  One game.  Knowing the nature of baseball, we all know this can easily come down to one pitch, not to mention one at-bat or one inning.  But to say Johnson did wrong by stopping cheating during his matchup with the Rays that would have gone on for the whole damn game?  Grow the fuck up.

I don’t care that cheating is a part of the game.  I’m well aware of the steroid era.  I’ll even admit to a little cheating when I played high school ball.  Before a game against a cross-county rival, my coach explained to me how to throw a cutter.  This wasn’t a normal cutter.  This was a ball doctored with cuts.  He taught me how to cut the ball with the metal of my glove.  There was discussion of the alternative, a spitball, in which he proposed using gel of some sort on the ball, but I wasn’t sure I could react well enough if the ump asked to see the ball.  As a youngster who took his pitching very very seriously, I only did it during one game, and I couldn’t sleep that night.  Never did it again.  For what it’s worth, I wasn’t even very good at throwing the “cutter” and we lost that game.  The next game I pitched, I did so the way I always did before that and coincidentally pitched the best game of my life.  8 1/3 innings, 11 SO, 2H, 1BB and I even got myself a double that turned into a run. 

I learned something from that game.  I learned that cheating has its roots.  They’re firm and they’ll never be pulled up.  But for as strong as these roots are, they’re unsightly, and they make the sport look bad when they’re in plain sight.  So, if I’m Davey Johnson and I know there’s a good chance my opposing pitcher is fucking over my batters, I’m going to walk over to the umpire, and I’m going to have him verify.  Because if I get to the end of this season and after having lost that game, I don’t get into the playoffs because I was a half-game out of Wild Card contention, I’m going to want to commit Seppuku, because it’s much more badass than putting a shotgun in your mouth.

There’s something unique about cheating.  Now I’m not just talking about baseball anymore, but the concept in general.  We cheat different things for different reasons.  People cheat on significant others because they fear losing something about them that they like while they’re with someone else who gives them something else they like.  People cheat in video games usually just because it’s a ton of fun and it doesn’t hurt anyone.  People cheat on tests because it may help advance their lives or careers.  Just like all of these situations, players cheat in baseball because they want to win and feel that they may not without it.  Know what?  I get that.  I’m not stupid and I understand that it’s going to happen forever, no matter what.

Know what else?  That doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye when it’s found out.  You can’t tell me that just because it didn’t involve drugs, we are to accept what Peralta did last night.  It’s unacceptable just as much as the steroids are.  I once had an opposing coach try to get me tossed from a game for throwing inside to his batters all day.  He was accusing me of trying to intimidate them and that this was unfair because not all pitchers at our level could control their pitches well enough to do this.  Therefore, unfair advantage.  Excuse me, but with no due respect, fuck you.  I worked my ass off as a kid to pitch that well.  Just like your best batter, Robby G. should have worked his ass off to get a more accurate right hook for when he charged the mound after I (cough, purposefully) plunked him later that game.  I know, I was an asshole, and still am.

The point is, just because I pitched well and knew how to paint the inside of the plate, doesn’t mean I was cheating.  It meant I was taking advantage of the situation.  It was definitely unfair, and I definitely don’t give a crap.  It was within the rules and that’s that. 

If it were spelled out in the rules that a pitcher could not use his skill or power to intimidate or egregiously outplay others, I would have been guilty and would have accepted a seat on the bench.  Similarly, if it were spelled out in the rules that you can’t rub pine tar on a baseball, then-  oh wait…

Stop being dumbasses.  End of rant.

On the musical writing process.

A good friend of mine asked me about this a week or so ago.  We got into a great (mostly one-sided) discussion about how one gets to the end of a piece of work, be it a blog post, a poem, or a song in word or notes.

What fascinates me every time I talk to a fellow writer is how similar but different the process is for them.  So for the fuck of writing it down, here’s mine.

Happiness Is Not a Cupcake

I’m writing again.  So there’s that.  Credit to AJS.

I cleaned up some crap posts on this blog and have fully decided I need to be writing again, and this time the way I wanted to from the beginning.  I let too much get in the way of one of my passions in life, and recent events have reminded me how shitty that is.  So let’s muse about that, eh?

I have many passions in life, however I think we all should keep them to a minimum.  If you find yourself with a handful of passions, how can you hope to be passionate about them?  A fucked conundrum.  I love music, writing, tech, baseball, and spending time with friends and family.  To balance the lot is an act to say the least.  As we speak, I’m listening to The Shins via iHeartRadio on my iPhone 4S that’s soon being replaced by a Galaxy SIII.  So I’ve got my mind there.  Simultaneously, I’m talking to my loved one about little nothings and my mind is there, and I’m thinking about the trip we’re set to take this weekend to explore Camden Yards to see the Phillies (blasphemy, I know).  Still, I’m here writing and thinking I should be feeling pulled in 5 different directions, but I’m not.  This is new; this is quite a welcome change.

There’s something to the idea that happiness makes life easier to live the way you see fit.  It’s my fault that I’ve been unhappy for as long as I have been, and it’s the fault of another that this has changed.  I thank her, wholeheartedly.

We all need to do our own part, for ourselves, to find that happiness and take the leaps, be they of faith or chaotic risk, to achieve it.  Sure, we can find momentary happiness in things.  But true happiness, happiness that lasts and drives into your core and stays there, is derived from risk.  I took some really wild risks lately.  I’m not the type, really.  I enjoy playing things safe and close to the chest as they say.  But I noticed a sickening pattern to my safety: I kept getting hurt. 

Alas, this is how it starts when things fall apart.  Because sooner or later you realize you can’t be free of something you need.  That’s why you need it.  Happiness is one such thing.  We would do nothing in life if not for the pursuit of happiness.  Unfortunately for so many of us, we forget what we’re supposed to do when we catch it.  We sit idle and either let it slip away again, or we mistreat it. 

We need to savor; to soak up; to protect it. 
It’s happiness, not a fucking cupcake.

iPad 3: DF reports that Bloomberg reports that everyone reports…

…that the iPad 3 is to have a bunch of interesting specs, Retina display, and LTE.

Oh yeah? Well I heard the McRib is coming back. Beat that.

Curing Hiccups

I got a nasty case of the hiccups today after running up the stairs and drinking soda at the same time. Serves me right. Still, they just wouldn’t go away. When I was hiccuping in front of a co-worker, she suggested The Sugar Method. It’s a simple method in which you place a decent amount of sugar on your tongue and just dissolve it against the roof of your mouth and swallow it. It worked! And I mean instantaneously. It was amazing. So it got me thinking about other methods of hiccup curing. Here’s my favorite oddity from the list at WikiHow:

The Indian Method

1. Close your eyes.
2. Think of a popular Indian character (Gandhi, Apu from The Simpsons, etc) and envision him in your mind very clearly.
3. Attempt to channel their voices through yours.
4. Speak gently and quietly.
5. Bob your head very slightly, side by side, making sure your eyes are still squeezed shut.
6. Lick your lips and say, “Did you order the chicken tikka masala?”
7. Slowly open your eyes and count to ten in Hindi (Google this beforehand if you don’t know how.)

I wonder if you have to do this in perfect order. Really though, it sounds like a brilliant use of distraction.