The Foreign Embassy

I'm moving stuff over from an old server. Don't be alarmed if things look skewy.

So, I spent the last couple days kicking the tires of Twitter. For the uninitiated, Twitter allows you to post online quick, soundburst-style updates of your current activity/mood/sexual position/etc. from your mobile phone, IM client, web browser, or whatever. I kept seeing Twitter links on blogs I would visit, and it seemed like the cool kids were doing it, and apparently the rumors that it was insanely addictive and just a gateway drug to the more lethal forms of web communication were just total rumors, and, well, I wanted to give it a try.

Basically, an explanation of Twitter to a standard friend of mine (FOM) would go thusly:

ME: So, I've started a Twitter account. Want to be my friend?

FOM: Why would I care?

Therein lies the rub. As a Twitter user, you basically have to assume that someone, somewhere, would care about what you're doing ALL THE TIME. I could see this being useful to an astronaut or a Navy SEAL or someone else with a life approximately ten thousand times more exciting than mine. But for me...honestly, I barely care about what I'm doing the vast majority of the time, and unless you're chained in a deep dungeon somewhere with the only enjoyment being the mental dialogue you maintain with the rats in your cell and my Twitter page on regular refresh on your computer monitor, you (with you being the World Wide Web at large, not you in particular, though the same probably applies) could almost certainly care even less.

Having already had an online presence here at the battered, neglected Foreign Embassy, my thinking when I created a Tumblr account was that I could use it to post and keep track of various links and photos that wouldn't warrant a full entry here. And it's worked for me. Twitter, following the same reasoning, would work similarly, but instead of hyperlinks, it would be for random thoughts. But the analogy falls apart with the sad, brutal truth that my random thoughts are either (a) not fit for public consumption, (b) completely nonsensical, (c) utterly boring, or (d) all of the above. I just can't be captivating in 140-character soundbytes (to which Statler and Waldorf shout from the balcony, "How many characters does it TAKE?").

Many Twitter users employ it as a means to maintain an online, ongoing conversation with multiple friends, but seeing as how the above conversation example would be pretty much spot-on for the vast majority of my friends, that doesn't work for me, either.

So farewell, Twitter, I hardly knew ye. Mayhap we'll meet again.

ADDENDUM: Well, we met again: last night, I sat down with a glass of wine and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and suddenly went all apeshit on Twitter with my iPhone. Go figure.

Of course I got one. There was never really a question of my getting one, much as I denied it to myself and others. Sure, I planned on going up to the Fifth Avenue store on Launch Day after work, but as I insisted to my rightfully skeptical colleagues, I was just going to LOOK, to soak up the atmosphere. And once I got up there and saw the media circus and the line a block long, well, forget about it. Just forget about it.

An impossibly quick fifteen minutes later, I was being handed an eight-gigger (Four gigs? Puh-LEEZ.) by the sprightly young thing behind the counter. Whoever was doing crowd control at Fifth Avenue must have had previous experience coordinating large-scale troop deployments, because I've never seen a line move so fast or so orderly. And once you were in the store, well, forget about browsing, 'cause that line was headed straight to the register. They knew, just as my snickering colleagues knew, that you don't wait in a line a block long, no matter how fast it moves, just to soak in the atmosphere. Poppa came to buy, and you better believe Poppa BOUGHT.

What can you say about this thing that hasn't been said? Easily five years ahead of the next most advanced cell phone or PDA on the market, it is, undoubtedly, the future. It's beyond slick. The touch interface is blindingly cool. When whipped out in public, it's a total showstopper: everyone wants to lay hands on it. Waiters, tablemates at weddings, salespeople at Banana Republic, EVERYONE. And rightfully so. It's beautiful. It's awe-inspiring. It's the glistening ejaculate of a techno-god from the next millennium.

Okay, that last one was a bit of hyperbole, but I swear, that's what I felt when I first held it in my hands.

It's not without some drawbacks, the most annoying of which, for me, is the lack of an ability to do tabbed browsing at will: on the iPhone, links only open in new windows if they're coded that way, and there's no shortcut to force it to happen, no equivalent of command-clicking in Safari. Now, I LIVE on tabbed browsing; I usually limit myself to an absolute maximum of three open browser windows (Poppa likes an orderly desktop), but those browser windows can easily have a dozen tabs each. Going back to un-tabbed browsing is a hobbling experience, particularly with a browser that doesn't cache previously loaded pages, and PARTICULARLY seeing as how coding links to open in separate windows inexplicably became poor netiquette some years back. On the often slow-as-molasses Edge network, this turns my usual browsing experience into an exercise in agony: go to Daring Fireball, wait for it to load, read, click on an interesting link, wait for it to load, read, go back to Daring Fireball, wait for it to load AGAIN, repeat ad nauseam. The iPhone interface for using separate windows is already there, and like everything else, it's slicker than snot: why the hell couldn't they put in some kind of way (my own idea was a double-tap of a link to open it in a new window) to let you use it?

Of course, no one else seems to be complaining about this, so maybe everybody knows something I don't. If you do, please God, tell me.

One other thing has gone unremarked in pretty much every glowing, superlative-crammed review of the iPhone I've read, but it's a feature that's single-handedly changed my life in a way no piece of technology has since TiVo:

I can now read the Internet on the crapper.

See, I'm a bathroom reader. Always have been, always will be. My throne at home is stocked with a library larger than that of a small municipality. At work, I tend to keep a copy of The Onion (bathroom reading at its finest) or the Village Voice close at hand for what I like to call "private time." I have, on numerous occasions, resorted to printing out interesting articles (most recently, New York Magazine's profile of Steve Jobs at home and sticking them in my pocket to be used as bathroom material later in the day. When push comes to shove, I've been known to read the instructions on shampoo bottles. When I'm there, I need to read.

Brother, I'm here to tell you, those days of wandering the desert are over. Now, I go to the porcelain throne with the WORLD in my pocket. I can look up Brother Power on Wikipedia. I can shop for a new Weber on Amazon. I can POST (you can guess where this entry was birthed, along with something else that was simply unspeakable).

I reluctantly admit that I have in fact used it while URINATING. This could, at some later date, pose a problem.

Viva la future!

...since I'm doing such a good job keeping up with this one:

offmango.com

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but the wee one's keeping me busy. Just click the image to see her in action.

The instructions, passed on to the missus by the guy at the meat counter, were simple: grill for forty-five minutes. And so, I popped the cap on a Dos Equis and headed down into the back yard, where I fired up the grill, the threw on the seasoned half chicken that was to be the evening repast. And then, with forty-five minutes to kill, I went back up to play with the baby, because nowhere in the above instructions does it state that the grill must be watched carefully, lest you leave to play with your child for twenty minutes or so and return to find the whole goddamn thing on fire.

The first indicator of a problem in the backyard came with the glance through the kitchen window that revealed a thin, but persistent, column of smoke rising steadily from the general vicinity of the grill. The second indicator was when I poked open said grill and found myself looking into what could have passed for a deleted scene in BACKDRAFT. Flames filled the grill and licked over the sides hungrily, and, stalwart fellow that I am, I threw myself on the ground to protect myself from the inevitable blowback explosion from oxygen flowing into the grill (I've seen BACKDRAFT at least seven times).

When no explosion came, I hurried over and turned off the propane, then pulled the coal-black carcass of what had at one point been a fine-looking hunk of chicken off the seared white grill once the flames had died down. It had shrunk to half its size and now resembled an oddly-shaped lava rock. I cut into it, holding out hope that I'd inadvertently discovered a new recipe for charred chicken, but the inferno that had engulfed the interior of the grill minutes before had failed to penetrate through the crusty outer shell that had quickly developed, and the inside was a bright pink. So I threw it on a plate and presented it to the missus, indigninantly citing the deficiencies in the instructions she'd passed on to me, only to learn that said chicken had been coated in tequila, apparently a popular seasoning technique that happens to be as flamable as all hell.

The missus, practical woman that she is, rightly chastized me for leaving a fatty chicken unattended on an open flame, then presented a backup meal of raw hamburger from the refrigerator. And so I returned to the grill, cleaned the blackened curls of fat off the grate, and did it up proper, watching those burgers like a hawk as I sat on the porch swing with the baby, instructing her in the finer points of grilling and waving off the planes carrying fire retardant and smokejumpers that had appeared overhead.

The best concert seats I've ever had in my life.