Monday, February 8, 2010

Facebook

So Facebook has finally learned its lesson. Instead of making a huge change all at once for everybody, they've made a huge change in waves. Brilliant. By slowly introducing the radically new homepage to groups of users at a time instead of all at once, they've successfully diluted and diffused all the apoplectic rage and just general honked-off annoyance they inevitably generate with each new change. Now by the time everyone is switched over, most people will have made their peace with the new iteration and there won't be as many "We hate the new FB, change it back" groups.
They've successfully managed to saw off at the knees any sense of unified, populist sentiment against the changes they've made to an already popular product by controlling when we get to complain about it, and knowing that our attention spans are so short that we'll eventually cope with it and move on before everyone can be pissed off together.

I don't really care too much about what Facebook looks like or how it works. I'll figure it out. But imagine what our country would look like if Congress figured out how to do this.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Petsmart

the 'lets-face-it-a-little-bit-frumpy-middle-aged-women' to 'putatively red-blooded american male' ratio in the cat section at Petsmart today was approximately 74.5 to 1, the half being a woman who may have been lost, and looking for ferret food instead. The unspoken camaraderie we were all feeling in the pursuit of just the most darling little nibblies and num-nums for our respective mr. snuggles-es and whiskers-es and socks-es (and Finnegans!) began to manifest in me as a sort of atavistic nausea, as my (undoubtedly) fierce warrior/hunter ancestors announced a genetic protest at this shameful loss of manliness. Indeed it was a harrowing look into my future: a future to be characterized by stringy gray ponytails, raised-texture t-shirts, and an unmistakable feline funk. Best to adapt now though, as later it may be more difficult to adjust to a life of hungry-man frozen dinners and early-evening network television. Still, at least Finnegan now has something other than my box spring to scratch. And he IS just the scratchiest little booger, darn his cute little paws.