perfidy

Apparently Google works, because some enterprising soul found a two-year old post of mine about infusing vodkas and had some questions about the construction of cayenne vodka. Well, Drunkle John is here to help!!

Amelia S. writes:

> Hello,
>
> I read your blog post from a loooong time ago about making infused vodkas. Apparently, you have cornered the online market for cayenne pepper vodka recipes. I grew some cayennes this year and want to make vodka, so I have a couple of questions for you:
>
> 1) If I only used a single cayenne, do you think that would tone down the heat?
> 2) Just out of curiosity, what do you think would happen if I left the pepper in the bottle permanently? I ask because I think it would be pretty. But, perhaps, deadly.
> 3) How did your ginger, orange, cranberry, and poblano vodkas turn out??
>
> Loved your post. Will probably link to it in my blog soon enough. :)
>
> - Amelia

Hi Amelia -

If you were to do just one pepper and leave it in the bottle permanently, I doubt anything bad would happen, and it would be pretty. But for cayenne vodka, I would recommend putting more than one pepper in, because cayenne flavor is a little one-dimensional and my suspicion is that one pepper only would give you heat but little pepper aroma or taste.

To tone down the heat and let some of the pepper character come through, you would probably want to remove the seeds and the inner membranes from the peppers before infusing - that means the seeds, the white pith, AND the very thin layer of whitish-pink veined flesh on the inside of the pepper. The skin and the deep red flesh are where the flavor and aroma are, but there's still some heat there. If you find that the resulting infusion lacks the desired punch after a week or two, put in another whole pepper with seeds included, and sample daily until the desired pain level is reached.

But know this - capsaicin is much heavier than ethyl alcohol or water and tends to sink to the bottom of the bottle. No matter which way you go, shake the bottle before each serving or that last couple ounces is going to be undrinkable.

As for my crazy experiments, the poblano wasn't too great - poblanos have a grassy character that dominated, without giving too much heat. Next time I will probably use seeded and de-veined habaneros. The ginger was merely OK - it takes a surprising amount of ginger to impart a distinctive ginger character to vodka. The cranberry was pretty good - a beautify ruby hue (the fruit came out of the infusion pallid and flabby - it really gave up a lot of character) with a nice tartness. The orange was extremely successful, a beautiful color with a lot of orange character.

If you're going to infuse vodkas, I'd recommend not doing what we did, which is to buy the cheapest stuff we could get and then try to filter out the heavier molecules that impart harshness. Despite good initial indications, it only works so well and the cheap vodka doesn't mix as well as even midrange hooch. Instead, get a decent bottle of grain vodka - a midrange one like Gordon's - and use that. The base hooch really ought to be drinkable on its own.

I haven't tried infusing in a while, and you remind me that I've been meaning to try a spiced vodka with cinnamon, green cardamom, clove, allspice and maybe just a tiny bit of cumin. Now I have a project! Thanks!

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Drunkle Johno

From Letterman:

10. War and Peace and Steve
9. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Steves
8. The Grapes of Steve
7. The Steves of Wrath
6. Steve Grapes Steve Wrath Steve Steve
5. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, Steve is From Cleveland
4. Where's Waldo? Is He With Steve?
3. Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume VIII: "Mysterious Guys Named Steve"
2. The Joy of Sex with Steve
1. The Bible (King Steve Version)

We come to the end of our educational series, “Alternate State Mottoes for Stupid States” with a state that is last on many lists, no matter how ordered, Wyoming. There is surprisingly much to say about a state that 99.83% of America’s population has wisely chosen not to live in:

• Come dig a hole in Wyoming!
• The Cowboy State. Other Village People not allowed
• WyOMFG!
• ET’s Summer Home
• Cedant arma togae
• First to make the tactical error of allowing women to vote
• Less is more. But more is more, too
• Square, but fun
• Rodeo riding is not gay
• Don’t Feed Grizzly Bears. They Eat People.
• Don’t Feed Cowboys. They Eat People.
• The other square state
• Home of the majestic jackalope
• Largely Balrog Free
• Woefully underdeveloped and tragically cowboyified
• Come for the arid emptiness, stay for the arid emptiness
• Save a horse, ride a Wyomingite
• Yogi lives in Jellystone Park, fucko
• Got Geothermal Activity?
• Join the Dick Cheney Memorial Hunt Club and bag a lawyer!
• No limit on lawyers!
• It’s Wyoming, Baby
• It takes decades of training to become a competent cowpoker
• Brokeback Mountain is in Faggotty Colorado
• In Bauxite, the Future
• Rocky Mountain Oysters, it's what's for dinner
• We Love Our Congressman
• The Diversity State, if by Diversity you mean lots of white folk in jeans and cowboy hats
• Land of a perverse number of mountains
• Like No Place on Earth. That’s not a good thing.
• Not Much, And Lots Of It
• Land of Wary Glances
• Big Fats
• A Rocky Mountain New Jersey
• The Suffering State
• With this few people, you’d think it’d be harder to find assholes
• Flat Is Where It's At
• Say “Wynot?” and I’ll pop a cap in your ass
• The Dwarrodelf
• Jackson Hole isn't as bad as it sounds
• I Live In Wyoming. Please Kill Me.
• Proving You Don't Need A City To Be A State
• Where men are lonely and sheep are scared
• 48% Government Owned
• Alice doesn’t live here anymore
• Gateway to Utah

[wik] Don't worry, your alternate motto fun is not completely dead - there are plans in the works to attack Puerto Rico and our Nation's capitol, and our crack team of researchers is looking into new and innovative ways to ridicule Europeans.

While it may surprise you, gentle reader, to hear that I am again guest posting on MO, considering that I am barely posting on this, my own website, the fact is that I have been Rossed to a large degree over the last couple weeks. The end is in sight (or at least the headlight of the oncoming train) and my time for blogging should be substantially greater in the immediate future. Unless I pick up all those freelance gigs I'm chasing. Anyways, here is the first of this week's Murdoc Online guest posts:

Greetings again, fellow Murdoc-cultists. The great and powerful Murdoc is once again goofing off, and has asked me to take up the slack with a few posts for you to educate and amuse yourself, and to productively use your time at work.

Our first topic is the troubled V-22 Osprey Tilt-Rotor, which is flying right over my head as we speak. The 418th flight test squadron out of Edwards in California has temporarily relocated to the tiny, tiny airport in Winchester, Va, only a half hour from my fastness in the wilderness. If you follow this link here, you can watch a very small video that shows some CV-22's landing and whatnot, and hear the reporter mispronounce several words.

The reason the Ospreys are in my neck of the woods is simple. They need the bad weather that California simply refuses to provide. In particular, they're looking for fog in which to test their terrain guidance systems. There's typically a lot of fog up here, so they shouldn't have too much trouble.

The Air Force version isn't scheduled to enter service until 2009, but the Marine MV-22 will be heading to Iraq in September.

I haven't actually seen one yet, they're actually flying a bit west of where I live. I am thinking of driving the boy up to the airport to see if we can catch a glimpse of one of those, and if I do, I'll post pics if I can get some decent ones.

[wik] Flash, and the video that was embedded in it, are long dead alas.
 

[wik] Not that I have a dog in this race, but I found myself thinking it would be fairly cool if the blender had broken and he'd been impaled by one or more iPhone parts. Nothing against Blender Guy, of course, and I'm sure that attitude is just a compensation for all the WWE & NASCAR I don't watch.
 

NASA's site commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Apollo landing read, "On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body."

But the NASA text, and other sources, typically ignore one important and obvious detail:

We CONQUERED it!

The British created a world spanning empire through the simple expedient of planting the Union Jack on soil inhabited by wogs who didn't know that flags meant ownership. Benighted natives woke to British officers telling them that they now lived in the British Empire. When they disputed this, the officers merely pointed at the flag and said, "See, there's the flag. England." And when they continued to disagree, there was always the Maxim gun. In keeping with this grand tradition of symbolic declaration strecthing back millenia (but without getting too into the semiotics of possession) our guy put our flag up there- so it's ours! Happily for the granola crunchy set, there were no Lunar aborigines that needed to be convinced more... strenuously.

Today is the 38th anniversary of that glorious event, when not just homo sapiens in general, but specifically God-fearing Amurricans left the cradle of Earth to begin the conquest of heaven. We sent men into space on a tower of fire, backed with nothing more than whiz-wheels, slide-rulers, and less computing power than my car's fuel injector. A relatively modest start, some might say - the Moon being low-hanging fruit, solar system wise - but it was a start nonetheless on the long road to interstellar domination.

And someday, when Old Glory waves on 10,000 worlds and our mighty fleets cruise the galaxy, our fair descendants will look back at the Moon and Apollo as the start of it all. The only question is how they'll fit all those stars on the flag.

Huzzah! Huzzah! For the bonnie striped flag borne by a single moon!

So there's this website I am doing some work for, that's run by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Yes, that Herb Alpert as if there were any other.

In any event, while cruising through the site's content library I recently came across proof positive that being old kicks ass. Some of you may have heard of Teo Macero, the legendary jazz producer who basically helped Miles Davis invent like four kinds of jazz, plus fusion, funk and electronic besides. Well, he's old now and kind of cantankerous. But he's got awesome stories.

Watch this great clip of Teo talking about working with Miles Davis, and wait for the part where he says "so I said book it, you white motherfucker!"

I'm g-dd-mn dying here, with the laughing. You can't make Blazing Saddles today, and you can't tell that kind of story if you're under sixty-five. Absolutely priceless.

Gogol Bordello, if you are even less cool than I am, is an amazing gypsy punk band out of NYC. It's a mix of klezmer and thrash punk. Or as I put it last night, it's punk music with an actual melody.

Everyone has their favorite, the violinist, the bass player, the lead guitarist, the dancers, etc.

I'd never heard their music till I went to the show. Everyone I know went last year and said it was by far the best show they'd seen in ages and no one had a bad thing to say about them, so when tickets went on sale, I bought them blind. It did not disappoint at all. I haven't rocked out like that in I don't know how long, at least a year. I haven't truly danced and thrashed like that in years. I can tell I should pop a Tylenol now because it's going to hurt.

My friend R, put it well:

Everyone, please STOMP extra hard for me, wear your combat boots, dance with big legs, and crowd surf! Then, tell me who won the concert!

I can tell you without a doubt, I won the concert. It was amazingly high energy, melodic, funny, exciting, electrifying.

There aren't that many US tour dates left. Most of them are on the West coast, but if you can go, GO! GO! GO! DAMMIT!

A: Because the muslims just won't stop coming!!!

So, check out this utterly entertaining tale from Britain's Independent of one journalist's voyage on the National Review's recent reader cruise. Every sentence contains a new nugget of outrageousness that should have sprung from the pen of a young Tom Wolfe, or T. Coraghessen Boyle, or any other fiction writer whose stock in trade is wacky cruelty, not from a publication that despite its biases still must cling to some version of reality-as-lived.

The set-pieces are iconic: William Buckley, the founder of the magazine and grey eminence of American Conservatism, sulking shunned and mocked in his cabin as his movementarians flock around the spittle-flecked beard of Norman Podhoretz. The leggy blonde suntanner advocating gassing a few liberals to show them the consequences of treason, in the same distracted way as one might wonder if they could go for a nice mojito right about now. Mark Steyn at a table of admirers, holding forth on the brown tide threatening to subsume the white purity of Albion, and the rest of Europe too.

Go read this, and get a glimpse of a world in which George Bush is a steel-spined visionary hero, ululating hordes of sandaled beasts spit Betel nuts (or date pits... it's so hard to know what these brown people chew... do they chew Betel nuts or is that hashish?) at the very feet of l'Arc de Triomphe, and American liberals wake every morning with their hearts rising toward Mecca, fresh for another day of materially supporting America's sworn enemies.

What did the thousands of moths who kamikaze my porch lights do before there were porch lights?

And, what did four year old boys obsess about before we invented cars, trucks, trains and planes?

[wik] The highly educated and fearsomely well-read NDR sent me a brief footnoted note to the effect that a thousand years ago, Swedes were killing each other over religion.

One thousand years ago Sweden was, in fact, in the midst a protracted process of conversion (as well as throughout Scandinavia). Until the late 12th century there were still bloody encounters between Christians and pagans. These conflicts form the backdrop of Bergman's Virgin Spring and Undset's Gunnar's Daughter.

To which I replied,

I think you misunderstood my intentions in that post. Yes, they were in the midst of a protracted religious struggle. Exactly. They were killing each other, so the issue of "trying to assimilate" would have been a complete non starter.

And, they were Vikings then, not watered down euro-weenies. It's only in the last few hundred years that Swedes (or anyone, for that matter) have realized that when your only tool for argument is an ax, all problems look like necks.

I didn't have any movies to quote though. Thinking a bit further on the matter, religious conflict is, by way of gross misunderestimation, a huge problem globally and throughout history. Most people seem to imagine that most conflicts are about greed or economics. Of course for the Marxists, that's being redundant. If not money, then power or political ideals. This may be true for some leaders. But the people - and many leaders - are not quite so cynical as we are. Many of the leaders in the Thirty Years' War certainly claimed that they were following God's will in smiting the heretics. And there is little doubt that many were convinced of the truth of their religious beliefs, to the point of motivating them to follow those leaders regardless of their "true" motivation.

In the whole world, there are only a few places, and only for the last four hundred years, that have proved even mildly immune to the temptation to go a-smiting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine where the home countries of those recent immigrants to Sweden fall in that classification scheme.

Sweden struggles to integrate Muslim immigrants.

Awhile back I toyed with the idea of regular posts alerting our reading public about the kooky junk I saw on a regular basis on my way to work.

I never did, because 1, it would have meant regular posting which I am not against, mind you, but am basically incapable of; and 2, I left the job to which I commuted, which took me over the sketchiest bits of Crackton and was the source of the enterprise in the first place. All kinds of stuff the poor, miserable, or spiteful threw from passing cars wound up on that little spur off the interstate except the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink however was a victim, still sitting in a busted up vanity on the side of the highway, long dead and just waiting for porcelain-eating vultures to start in on the carcass.

Anyway, I still have alot of highway driving for my new gig, but none of it cuts through the city. Although my new commute does take me through some nasty streets of Little Newark, I'm too focused on not getting carjacked to notice much else.

So, the other day I did see something on the highway I'd never seen before: the most grisly roadkill ever.

To be sure I have seen the gruesome remains of prior victims of the critter-bumper interface. One time in particular, out in the leafier parts of the state, I came upon the aftermath of a moose that had been thoroughly killed by a big tour bus coming back from a casino. Oh-dark-thirty, middle of nowhere on a dark stretch of interstate and whammo. Now, what I saw that time was very messy indeed, but the body was long removed and all that remained was a gory swath in the road and bit of busted headlight and bumper on the median. The rest was left to the imagination.

But what I saw last week was still...eh, fresh.

I was tooling along when suddenly the traffic started thickening up in a place and at a time when it never does. That is, the mouthbreathing fuckwits who usually do mess up everybody's commute by rear-ending each other or catching their cars on fire typically do it closer to the city proper. This was still in suburb terrain. After many miles of stop and go, it turned out that everyone was slowing to go around the...scene.

I *think* it was a deer.

What I saw was...ok, I've poked around my thesaurus and racked my brain for a better choice of words, but I just come back to "pile".

It was a big pile of deep red glop, with a single tawny leg stiffly sticking out of it.

And that's it.

Whichever of Deity's wonders that animal had been the night before, by that morning it had been reduced to its basic components and left in a heap. It was almost as if a petulant child-God had started to create a lifeform and had begun monkeying around with some parts, but then got bored and went out to round up some of his God chums to find something more fun to do, like inspiring mortals to wage wars in their names, and have a good solid holy yuk at it all. Meanwhile his model animal project was left in the corner, unfinished, perhaps to complete later, perhaps never to complete at all.

It was like that.

I just heard him on On Point via public radio, WAMU in DC.

I was really stunned and impressed at his enthusiasm, optimism and outlook. I don't think I have heard such an uplifting guy in politics since the OTHER guy from Hope, AR.

You gotta love a guy that lost over a hundred pounds. That's transformation.

Politically speaking, I am not wild about Mike Huckabee at all. He's pro-life and frankly I'm enough of a one issue voter that there's NO FREAKIN' WAY I'd vote for him because of that position alone. But I found him remarkably in line with my thoughts about the stupidness of the creation/evolution debate. His feeling is that he takes his kids to church to indoctrinate them about religion and doesn't expect school to align with religious views because kids learn a great many things at school but do not take all of them to heart. HEAR HEAR. Give your kids some credit and let them think on their own about God! After all the beauty of God's gift of free will is that when faced with the notion that God perhaps didn't create the world exactly as we know it, you can either reject or accept it.

All of his kids went to public school for all twelve years. He's a guy who puts his money where his mouth is and I'm all for that.

I didn't listen to all of it in detail because I was busy doing some other blogging, but the parts I did hear left me with a good impression. I mean, if I have to choose between evils, the guy is looking pretty good.

So Scooter Libby, convicted by a jury of his peers, has been unconvicted by El Presidente. The ability of the President to pardon is enshrined in the constitution, and is generally constrained only by the ethics of the grantee of the power. Bush, determined to break down the agreements and conventions that have kept the country running for hundreds of years, has begun to pardon his inner circle. Under the Bush theory of the Presidency, any subordinate can commit a crime and be "pardoned", or have his or her sentence commuted in advance. This leaves us with the uncomfortable situation of having a rather unconstrained executive branch, to say the least. Near as I can tell there is only ONE remedy for a President that abuses his authority in this fashion: Impeachment.

The President can pardon like mad unless Congress decides to remove him from office; I wonder what it would take to begin the process. I've been curious about how the GOP intends to shield its minions from a pissed-off inbound executive. Pardons can only happen if a prosecution has taken place, so unless they get those prosecutions cracking now, they're going to be unshielded later on.

This is one of the highest profile cases on record that quantifies exactly how the dual system of justice in this country works.

Colleague Patton wrote not too long ago on this very topic, so I guess you could say that we disagree. The question remains: Where is the check and balance on the Executive when it comes to pardoning his own inner circle?

And just so we're clear, I believe that the GOP has, in this round of administration, done nothing less than break down the barriers between church, state AND party. When members of the executive are emailing each other on their GOP party accounts discussing the introduction of the church into policy, you've got quite a trifecta underway.

I bring you David Gross of San Francisco, who not only:

...asked his bosses for a radical pay cut, enough so he wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the war.

but

In any event, his employer turned him down and he quit.

Which, I guess, good for him, standing up for his convictions that way and all. Left unanswered, at least for now, is whether federal taxes are levied on the wages of "guests of the Federal Government". Why would I be curious about that? Because

Gross, 38, now works on a contract basis, and last year he refused to pay self-employment taxes.

All by itself, that doesn't distinguish him from a lot of people. The AP story notes that between 8 and 10 thousand people fail to pay their taxes for reasons similar to those of Gross. Contained in the story, at a meta-level, is the fact that this particular non-Rhodes Scholar allowed the AP to write a story about him evading taxes. Nothing like calling out the IRS by name to get them to leave you alone. Posing in two pre-mug shots for the story? A priceless addition, though I'm sure the Feds could already have found him whenever and wherever they needed to.

Of course, these days, he won't end up becoming a guest of the Federal Government:

Unlike the days when Thoreau was sent to prison in a tax protest against the Mexican-American War, modern war tax protesters rarely go to prison, according to tax resisters. The IRS may take their money from wages and bank accounts - with penalties and interest - after sending a series of letters.

"They're very polite, which makes it a little boring," said Rosa Packard of Greenwich, a longtime anti-war tax protester.

But if he thinks he is going to avoid collection of his taxes owed, by hook or by crook, after having trumpeted his resistance on a national newswire, he's perhaps not smart enough to be gainfully employed, as a contractor or otherwise.

Will his protest, and others like his, have the desired effect? As James Taranto said in the OpinionJournal piece where I first saw this story, "Something tells us the economy will survive."

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

...that we live in a world of plenty, nay, a decadent world. Did he really need that badly to see the innards of his new iPhone?

I don't think he's just trying to get his Bluetooth speakers working, either. At $500+ a pop, he must have been affirmatively pissed at his new toy. [wik] For any iPhoners who might find themselves irked at activation problems, don't worry, don't get mad, and don't bust your iPhone to smithereens. It seems that "DVD Jon" has already broken the activation process. [alsø wik] For those with WSJ subscriptions, further info on the myriad workarounds the first week of the iPhone's life hath wrought.

Found in today's NY Times:

Correction: Just Don’t Call Them Inexpensive

Published: July 5, 2007

An article last week about inexpensive dresses misstated the name of a clothing store on Broadway. It is Yellow Rat Bastard, not Dirty Yellow Bastard.
(Go to Article)

I haven't had time to post much lately, for which I abjectly apologize. But I have run across some interesting bits I'd like to call your attention to.

• Here's a nifty National Geographic piece on swarm behavior, or how while individual ants are staggeringly inept, ant colonies are not.
• While I certainly like the new iPhone more than Mapgirl, this guy is really down on the Jesus Phone.
• The Ministry has for some time now been trying to alert the public to the threat of robots. While humanity as a whole will certainly all experience the cold metal boot of robot domination, we probably won't all feel it at once. Among the first groups to feel the iron grip of robotic oppression might just be migrant workers. As if they didn't have enough to contend with.
• The New Yorker is occasionally interesting.
• The recent release of some old CIA documents has raised some eyebrows. And sent conspiracy types into overdrive. And it looks like we did after all try to get the mob to rub out Castro.
• Wired interviews Hans Reiser, linux guru and accused murderer.
• Times puff piece on cyberwar.
• Yes, it does.
• Mars or Bust! I think that terraforming Mars would be a fabulous idea. Of course, we need to get there first. One real advantage with Mars, is that we could use rather, uh, drastic methods in the period before we start setting the planet.

Enjoy, and I'll try to post something substantive real soon now.

Now this is my idea of a summer camp.

[wik] I wonder if they get to play with these:

Given even the slightest chance, the Bush administration has shown an amazing ability over the past several years to choose the worst of all possibilities presented to it in any given circumstance.

However, with last evening's commutation of prison sentence for Scooter Libby, they appear finally to have gotten one right.

Libby's head was hung on a pike for public political enjoyment (and no, I neither have time nor feel like going into the details), and his case has not reached even its first appeal. The happy dance so far engaged in by the judicial class in Washington DC has served to do nothing but continue the political theater and public shaming of Libby. The courts' having ordered him to begin his jail term with his appeal in process, while not unheard of, is far outside the bounds of standard practice in these matters.

For anyone who might disagree with that characterization, I've got two words for you, words that in any rational comparative world would cause snickers and insistence that Libby receive full exoneration and the apologies of the government for its having hassled him: "Sandy Berger". And the fact that they both have little-boy first names is only a coincidence.

Back to my point - Bush had several choices which would have made a hash of this matter, including doing nothing (wrong, not because it might have upset "the base", but wrong because loyalty and fairness dictated action of some sort), and issuing a full pardon (wrong, because he was convicted, however potentially wrongly, and his appeals have not yet run their course).

Deft handling of the matter, via a focus on the one ragingly unfair portion of the story - the immediate incarceration, was as welcome to see as it was surprising. I've come to expect the Bush administration to regularly puke in its own lap, and this time, they didn't.

The fine stays in place, along with the probation, all pending completion of the appeals process. If those appeals are unsuccessful, for the record, I'd react badly to an end-of-term full pardon, just so we're clear on things. Based on what I've seen of the judicial process so far, however, I expect Libby to eventually clear his name in the courts. Allowing him to do so outside of the Graybar Hotel seems quite fair to me.

For the first time in quite a while, then, I'm in a position to compliment Bush for not fucking up something simple. Which is a blessing and a shame, now that I think about it.

I happened to be near the Apple Store yesterday. (Buying a geek book for work down the street from it.) I wandered in. The hype crowd had cooled down but it was still hoppin' for a cool summer evening. A Monday no less.

Now I know Buckethead is drooling over the phone, but I've been interested in it because I am looking for a laptop alternative. I hate blogging inside my house on a nice day. I would love to go to a cafe and blog over WiFi and check out the jarheads on PT runs. What good is living near the Pentagon if you don't get gym queen eye candy? (Really, it's like living in the Castro in SF again, except the men are straight and not quite as ripped.) But I digress.

I really want a laptop and was seriously considering a MacBook, priced the damned thing and everything. Looked at the refurbs, offered to buy one off a girlfriend who hated hers. (She and I are of the same ilk, no lifting your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. It wastes time.) But I thought maybe I should wait a see what this iPhone thingamabob is all about. You see, I have a 4GB Nano I won in a blog contest and I really don't use it. I have an indash 6-CD changer and usually that's enough music to last me months without a change. I even mislaid the thing for a few months because I just don't need audio white noise in my life. I abandoned my Palm V after I didn't have a desktop anymore to sync it to pull down articles from AvantGo and read them on the train and because I was a car commuter and didn't have the time to read anymore.

So here I am at the store. I looked at an iPhone and started to use it as instinctively as I knew how because a really great GUI doesn't need instructions. It should be intuitive and obvious. Right?

Well, I had heard a little about how the button gets you always back to the start page with your icons. I admit, it's a beautifully clear screen with great width, but it's about the size of my old Palm V and still feeling a bit large in the hand. (I use a KRZR right now, not crazy about it, but it's narrow, which I like.)

After about 30 seconds, I wanted to hurl the damned thing across the room. Luckily for Apple and its patrons, it was bolted down.

Excuse me, but this gadget was designed by men for men. Being the girly girl that I am, I keep my fingernails long. I like to scratch the itch. There's nothing more satisfying than bearing down and taking a layer of dermis off when you've got a terrible itch. Unfortunately, that precludes using this device. Period. End of story. I don't even need to proceed any further. If you are not a nail biter, you can never use this phone.

All the men around me thought it was the bomb. I glanced at their fingers. They were all effing nail biters. Shit. Even I AM a nail biter when I am bored at work, but I don't bite down to the quick. That's disgusting and makes your fingers bleed, an even worse biohazard. But of course their fat sausage fingers are greasy and skating right across the glass surface. The idea of that makes me nauseated and reach for the Windex.

All around me I heard was that it was amazing. Honestly, I don't think it's that great. It's still not going to replace a laptop and wireless connection for a person like me. Either I want a phone or I want a highly connective mobile device, but apparently what I really want is a sub-notebook about 4-6" across with a wireless card, and a full-size 110-key folding keyboard accessory. The Jesus phone doesn't cut the mustard at all. (I am seriously thinking of patenting that idea so if any of you are electrical engineers with experience in injection molded plastics, please contact me.)

I don't have chunky fingers and I was still mistyping out the wazoo. I literally had to hunt and peck with my ring finger (shortest fingernail) to type. The interface could not keep up with my speed. Also, for the auto guessing of words, I couldn't easily figure out at first which button would complete the fill because I could not accurately ascertain which one I was hitting. (Why does the return key actually do a carriage return after it autofills? That's crap. Auto fill with no line break.) I did try covering my finger with my shirt tail and typing, which was surprisingly effective, even through a couple layers of fabric. I hear that with gloves on, it's impossible to use, which sort of precludes outdoor winter use, say in front of a bar grabbing a smoke trying to get your friends to meet you inside in 15 minutes as they walk from the metro. (Who says the smoking ban in SF, NYC and DC sucks? At least you get clear signal outside!)

The other thing that really struck me as poorly done is that the screen automatically rotates the output for web browsing. Ok, that's pretty neat and a good idea. But when you use Safari and the top tilts 90 degrees to the right, that's great. I'm a righty and that instinctive for me. But when I was looking at the embedded YouTube application, IT TILTED THE OTHER WAY. Um, not cool to have to rotate it 180 degrees from the web browser just to watch video. That's insane. The Apple dweebie in the store insisted that I had done something wrong, however, a device should never automatically switch from one orientation to the other like that spontaneously. I should be able to set it to a righty setting and lefties should get their own setting. That's a pretty reasonable GUI expectation.

To be fair, my blog looked GREAT onscreen! So did my blogpal, David's blog (see the iPhone inputted comment I left there and the crappy typos). And PFBlogs.org. Three sites I would definitely visit if I had a mobile device. I have a PSP and I have tried to use WiFi to browse the web with it, but frankly it sucks. The iPhone is VAST improvement over that. The incoming sound over iPod headphones was ok. I didn't get a chance to hear back from anyone about how the phone messages sounded that I left for them. (Buckethead?)

OH. Word to the hygiene wise, if you wish to go to see this device, TAKE YOUR OWN HEADPHONES. It was vile to watch the unwashed masses use the the same headphones over and over. I happened to have my iPod in my purse and used my own self-defiled headphones, thank-you-very-fucking-cleanliness-much. I only wish I had Purell because I was touching that screen all over and was getting grossed out. I didn't want to put it up to my face to use lest my skin I break out from necrotizing faciitis. Really, you cannot be too careful around these Mac fans. While their brand image may be clean, oy vey, their clientele is not. And this is the NoVA, BMW-driving yuppie crowd. It was teh ick. And for those not in the know, I am not a clean freak, but basic public health demands some more caution. Thank god it came out in the summertime, because during flu season, it would be quite the vector for spreading germs. (Don't even tell me that these are special headphones with the mic in the cord, I don't care. It's gross. Do want me to breathe all over your food the next time we dine together?)

Ok, that's enough of my ranting. You get the point. I'm not throwing away money on this thing. I pity Buckethead who will probably shed tears of joy when he first gets it and the curse AT&T 6 months later for the poor service. (News tip, VERY VERY LATE on Friday afternoon, 6pm ish EDT, AT&T announced the purchase of Dobson Telecom, which will give them better coverage in flyover country, so in a year, complaints about spotty service around the US might actually be moot. I presume I will still not be able to get a signal from inside the anechoic chamber better known as my parents' home. I swear, the NSA doesn't even block radio signal that well. Only Verizon gets through there. Sprint, Nextel AT&T nothing. You have to walk down the driveway to the sidewalk to get signal.)

[wik] I really, really, really wanted to like this phone. I did. I really want to be one of the cool kids and I was hoping it would be suitable for what I want, but alas, it's not. I *heart* Steve Jobs and I'd give my left pinkie to go work at Pixar, even if that would slow down my typing, I'd do it. There's something hot about the turtleneck and the rimless glasses, but I bet he's another psycho behind the wheel of a black BMW, because he definitely is a megalomaniac.