i-dolatry

Today half the internet is in a state of wild-eyed, priapic excitement over the latest whatever-it-will-be that Steve Jobs reveals today. Geeks all over the world have been metaphorically shaving their legs and sliding on their sexiest underwear in preparation for this moment. (I may have done some slight gender mixing in my sexual metaphors there, but I'm sure you'll cope)

I on the other hand, am less breathless and and doe-eyed. Not because I don't suspect that the i-whatever will be something pretty cool, but because I have become steadily more and more bitter and twisted by the unquestioning drooling and fundamentalism that spreads amongst the population whenever Steve Jobs speaks.

Firstly, lets get over the stuff that Apple does well. They produce cool new products that tend to be ahead of the field. They are also seemingly the first tech company that recognised the value of design and style, and that you can actually spend money on making things look really good as well as just functioning well.

What they really do best though is marketing. Not just producing stuff but convincing many, often thoughtful, people that to own an i-thingy is cool and somehow sticking-it-to-the-nasty-microsoft/PC-man.

But, it's a massive and incredibly rich multinational corporation. You're not supporting some struggling hand-to-mouth co-operative when you buy an Apple. They sell more computers than anyone else. I'm sure they also sell more MP3 players than anyone else, and increasingly are taking a huge slice out of the mobile phone market. It's as if Pepsi had managed to convince everyone that to buy Pepsi and not Coke was some kind of independent-minded, deeply liberal thing to do.

Apple consumers (and you are a consumer, not a style guru), will go around telling everyone how amazing their ipod/macbook/iphone/whatever is this week's gimmick is. You don't get that from other people. You don't hear people who use Windows raving about how amazing their OS is, or people who have a Dell or an Acer or something go on about their computer, but Apple users never bloody shut up about it. Is this because the current Mac OS is better than the current MS OS? No. There have been some very very shit versions of Windows and there have been some equally shit versions of Mac OS. An OS is a like a language - you feel slightly more comfortable using the one that you first used, but you can learn to use another if you chooose and one is not inherently better than the other. In the main, Mac OS does some things better than Windows and Windows does some things better than Mac OS. Big deal. Some people prefer Coke to Pepsi, others prefer Pepsi to Coke. Get over it. You have a computer. It's a product just like any other. And, I might venture to add, an expensive one at that. For whatever reason pretty much everything made by Apple costs significantly more than it's non-Apple equivalent. Given that they have a willing army of evangelists ready and willing to openly masturbate (metaphorically) over their products, they don't even really need to spend anything on advertising so they ought to be cheaper, but no.

I have to hand it to Apple, honestly. They do make good stuff, but this marketing trick is absolutely amazing. I half-expect people to start showing up at the door offering copies of Watchtower and telling me how Apple changed their life, and how Steve Jobs is their personal lord and saviour.

But when I see people I respect and like who've obviously been suckered into the role of willing tool in extending the reach of a massive multinational corporation it makes me sad and makes me want to slap them (gently - I like these people, remember) until they snap out of it.

Apparently one of the possible names for today's big unveiling is the i-con. Seems really appropriate.

They all look the same to me

It is said that people from one ethnic group cannot tell members of another apart. There does seem to be a grain of truth in that, though if people really say they can't tell two different people apart (assuming they're not identical twins) it seems to me that they're really not trying that hard. Anyway, before this post becomes something serious, let me get onto the not-that-serious point of this post and the reason I started down this dangerous little side track. This is that I have recently become aware of a certain group of (sort-of) people which I cannot tell apart.

My daughter, Paula, is a princess. Obviously as a doting father I sort of think this anyway, but this statement comes not from me but from her. She tells me, and anyone else who is paying attention, on numerous occasions every day. She also is a big fan of other princesses. And so, on my recent trip I brought back a Disney princess memory card game (the kind of game that we used to call pelmanism until that word was co-opted to refer to prejudice against Pelmans). In this game, there are pictures of many princesses from Disney films over the years. The definition appears quite flexible, so a character could have started the film a princess and remained as one, or the character could have started the film a humble woman who lived in a menage-a-huit with a bunch of dwarves, or a mermaid or what-have-you, but finished it shacked up with a prince.

The thing is, I get absolutely trounced in this game every time. Partly this is because my short-term memory is shot to pieces through age and youthful indiscretion, partly because Paula, despite the limited attention span of a three-and-a-half-year old, seems to have the recall skills of a small, blonde, cute elephant, but mostly (I contend) because all these bloody princesses look exactly the bloody same. You pick up one card and it features some indeterminate blonde-haired pink-clothed princess. "Aha", you think to yourself, "I've seen this before", and pick up another card bearing a similar, but crucially in the context of the game, not exactly the same, image. Every time.

To be honest, there are one or two of them which I can tell from the others, but these are the one or two princesses from different ethnic groups. Ariel, for example (ethnic group: mermaids) is clearly different from the others, as is the princess (whatever her name is) from Aladdin (ethnic group: non-threatening Middle Eastern. More belly dancer than burka). But those two aside I'm lost. Why? Why do all princesses have to look the same? Is there a rule? They even all dress the same (exceptions: mermaids and belly dancers). Are there no individualists in the princess world? It's a rum do, and no mistake.

About a Toy

I feel like my last few posts have gone a bit much down the nationalism/anti-nationalism path so I thought for a bit of light relief I'd recount the stories of three toys/children's playthings that have caught my attention recently.

The first of these is a toy that Bogi owns which is one of those plastic boards with holes in in which you can make pictures with different coloured pegs. I presume those things have a name, but I don't know what it is. Anyway this one is Chinese and the box is covered in various pieces of "information" in English, which is obviously somewhat offbeat. Nothing particularly new there, obviously, but one of the important selling points of this particular item is that it "Grows in interest and creativity the sex". (I wanted to take a photo of it but my camera is crap at that kind of close-up work). Now, Bogi is 8. I don't want her to grow in interest and creativity the sex. Well, I hope she does one day, but not for a good few years yet. What is this slogan saying about us as a people? I don't know, you can buy vibrating cock rings in my local Merkur supermarket these days too (true). What next? [After, a great deal of pondering I have come to the conclusion that the original phrase thus butchered probably meant something more along the lines of "This is a good toy for both girls and boys"]

The second is one which I haven't seen in the flesh (or in the synthetic polymer, I guess), but it is advertised quite often on one of the cartoon channels that we have. This is "wethead". Basically it is a plastic helmet with lots of rods sticking out of it. You fill it with water, put it on, and then spin it around. You (or your friends) then remove one of the rods, which may or may not cause you to be drenched with water. It is, with very few modifications, a way of teaching children about the joys of Russian Roulette. Is there a teenage version where you "just" break an arm if you are unlucky, or does one have to go straight from wethead to The Deerhunter?

The third is not exactly a toy, but a book. This is the very small children's version of that popular Disney classic "The Little Mermaid" (yes, I know). Anyway, this book, finely crafted from the finest thick cardboard to thwart attempts to destroy it by illiterate toddlers or exasperated parents, is not very long so I will recount the story in its entirety to you here.

Ariel is a mermaid. She has many friends in the sea. (picture of mermaid, crab (I think), fish, and seagull) Flounder is Ariel's best friend (picture of cartoon fish). Sebastian loves music (crab, or feasibly lobster). Scuttle likes to joke around (seagull holding fork, for unknown reason). Ariel chooses to live on land with Prince Eric. (kiss)

Wow. What a brutal ending. Very brave of the authors to go with the "no plot" approach. Obviously there is some in depth character development, but suddenly we reach the traumatic denouement of what passes for the story. What brought on this abrupt lifestyle change? What of her so-called friends, so cruelly abandoned? We will never know. One is left with a sense of alienation, of tragedy, and of the desperation of the migrant experience. In the end, the reader is asked all the right questions relating to the very contemporary theme of assimilation and what it means for identity. In the end we realise that the author's minimalist approach to plot and storytelling is a device intended to ensure that we are not distracted by extraneous information. He or she has taken Hans Christan Anderson's timeless classic and re-imagined it for the 21st century. The crux of the matter is presented in sharp detail, and the reader is invited to make up his or her own mind. I don't know if it was in the shortlist for the Booker Prize in whatever year it was published, but it really ought to have won.

Baby Einstein

If you don't have children you'll be unaware of the phenomenon of Baby Einstein. So, let me fill you in. Baby Einstein is the biggest, most annoyingly simple money making scheme in the world outside of all those US companies who grow fat over "reconstructing" stuff that the US government bombs.

It works like this: some genius in San Francisco or somewhere had this idea that parents want their kids to be exposed to culture and all that stuff, while also being taken out of their hands for a while. Additionally that research was published some time ago suggesting that babies (and foetuses) who listen to Mozart will be vastly more intelligent than ones who listen to heavy metal or boy bands or something. So, they came up with the baby Einstein videos. In these videos music is played (we have the "Baby Beethoven" one), while on screen there are pictures of toys. And, in a nutshell, that's it. And, get this, they don't even pay for the toys - at the end of the video (which only lasts half an hour for your 15 quid or whatever they cost) there is a list of toyshops which supplied the toys.

So their business plan went something like this -
1. Get toyshops to give us a bunch of toys,
2. film them in action,
3. put the film to Beethoven's music (obviously out of copyright),
4. produce vast quantities of DVDs,
5. charge inflated prices for them
6. sell them to middle class parents

More or less no overheads, and a huge profit margin. It's brilliant. Really, I am always simultaneously irritated and impressed by people who come up with some incredibly simple idea through which they can make vast amounts of money. Bastards.