With the inventation of Google Glass, a $1600 piece of apparati that will make you look like Arnold nolastnamenecessary in the Terminator, it's clear we're living in the end times a new era. In the movie Wall Street, Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko character said "Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you Buddy ? It's the free market." Sorry to correct you Gordy, but we're living in a technocracy.
Financial companies were all the rage until Elliott Spitzer, with his socks on, made them grab their ankles and those who weren't bailed out by the government, had their stock price tossed in the crapper. And the once king of the dweebs, Bill Gates, now has more money than some countries and his full-time job is to give it all away and let Steve Balmer ruin the PC own the LA Clippers. And when a Steve Jobs, who ran a technology company, had the ear of the president, and not in a Van Gogh way, clearly the tides have changed or turned and things have flipped and gone downside up.
Technology execs are the new rock stars and those who buy their products are the cool kids with back stage passes. I’m a tech fan but I handed it to the next guy when Bluetooth got passed to me. Pretentious narcissists wearing earpieces in my town must be so busy and important that they must be talking down disabled aircraft while at the Quickie Mart. I'm not sure what I'd do if I came across someone wearing Google Glass, but I think it might remind me of the scene in Airplane where one guy, in a dramatic gesture, pulls off one pair of glasses and he has another smaller pair on underneath. I think his name was Kramer and not the Dustin Hoffman guy from Kramer vs. Kramer who makes lousy french toast or Seinfeld's neighbor with the wacky entrances or even the guy on CNBC who screams stock picks and hits Uncle Ben’s rice with a tennis racket but as in "when Kramer hears about this, the shits gonna hit the fan."
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, recently auctioned off an hour of his time for $610,000 while a full day with Bill Clinton, won by Leonardo DiCaprio, only fetched a hundred grand. It's rumored that Leo wants to recreate the 'I Believe I Can Fly' scene from Titanic with the former president playing the Kate role and wearing a stained blue dress from the Gap.
In days long past, physical acumen was the true test of power and the bigger caveman would dunk the smaller caveman's head in the hole where everyone pees. We evolved from brute strength being the deciding factor to royal bloodline with inbred offspring at the wheel to a the time where cash was king and through the Information Age to the era where the Fruit of the Loom wedgies middle school nerds become the billionaire Zuckerbergs of our world.
It the movie The Social Network, twin Olympians had their asses handed to them by a small Jewish kid who never threw a punch, although he did want to fu€k them in the ear. I twice heard that actors want to be rock stars and rock stars want to be actors but I think both wanted to be Steve Jobs while he was alive as Jobs had both among his groupies and drove his Mercedes around Palo Alto without a license plate because having a plate would attract too much attention.
I think the reason for this upside down Casablanca like society is because we’re so dependent on our technology, that we worship at the altars of Google and Apple and Amazon and Microsoft Facebook. I can't imagine a day without my iPhone 6 Plus, I affectionately call my iPhablet, and I'm typing this post on my 128gb iPad Air 2 with a bluetooth keyboard while downloading podcasts to my MacBook Retina Pro which is syncing with my iPod Classic, a 2TB Time Capsule, and my iPod Nano I converted into a watch and watching Netflix on my Apple TV and playing The Simpsons Tapped Out on my iPad Mini 3 while my iPad 3 Retina is on standby. A year or so back when the Mayan calendar was on its last page, I had an Armageddon kit in the back of my Jeep Wrangler that consisted of bottled water, canned food, batteries for my flashlight, and a lightening charger for my iDevices.
During Hurricane Sandy, those with no power and no heat were most concerned about charging their computers and phones and checking their email. Malls in my area set up charing stations with hundreds waiting on line and those with enough battery, were parked in front of the Apple Store piggy-backing off of the wi-fi.
Apple's recent World Wide Developers Conference sold out in 71 seconds and the faithful wait on line for weeks for the next iPhone. The Big Bang Guys garner the highest ratings yet tough guy Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson barely got The Hero's cape untangled.
11 out of 10 drivers, in a study I made up for this column, text or talk on the phone while in traffic and Fort Lee, NJ has a ‘no cell phones while walking’ law as distracted texters step off of curbs and imitate road kill. Tweenagers, adults by age and not by intelligence, can pilot a 3000lb. rolling death machine while chatting about the Kardashian’s with sheetrock sized phones pressed to their ear as if the car would stop if they put down their phone, and as if what they’re talking about could save all of humanity.
Adults are no better off and I see mustached men in their fifties with Blackberries glued to their head apparently conversing with the past. I could say this is new behavior but humanity has been doing multi-tasking while driving for a millenia with subway-folded Wall Street Journal up against the steering wheel and an electric shaver in the free hand.
The antihero Dexter Morgan elevated ‘science geek’ to serial-killing badass and the dorks from Alphas taught us that Dungeons and Dragons alumni are our only hope. The Big Bang guys are rock stars and the Apple Store genius gig is harder to wrangle than a $100,000 a year spot at Stanford. And if I knew that trading my New York Giants jersey for a Star Wars light saber would be good a career move, I would have changed my name to Obi-Wan. The cool kids go to superhero movies which are based on comic books and Harry Potter, who beat the bully at his own game, got bested by Ron Weasley's girlfriend.
The bullies of yesteryear line up with their resumes to dance for those they use to push around and the Zuck, who has more money than Greece, pays the bullies to flush their own heads in the crapper. And that reminds me, I need to give lunch money to Dr. Sheldon Cooper.
