Author: Stagger Lee

Review, thoughts, etc. follow. Skip this post until you see it.

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First off, this is not Iron Man 3, no matter what the posters and the titles tell you. This is Iron Man 4, and the movie makes little sense without taking into account the actual third Iron Man movie, i.e. The Avengers.

To a big extent, this movie is about Tony Stark coming to grips with PTSD induced by saving the world from gods and aliens and almost dying on the other side of the universe after carrying a nuke through a wormhole and being unable to get the love of his life on the phone while doing it. He does exactly what you would expect – he spends his every waking minute building more suits, improving his armor, creating more options, and when I say every waking moment, I mean he’s not really sleeping much. And it’s taking exactly the toll one would expect on him. Take that as your premise, allow for the idea that this is the fourth movie in the series, think about Superman IV and reflect on how much worse it could all be, and let’s just ride from there.

I appreciate that they were trying to be subtle in how they reflected the events of New York. But they didn’t really give a good accounting of why War Machine, né Iron Patriot, was nowhere in sight at the time. You could infer from some early remarks (“there have been nine explosions, but the government only admits to three”) that Rhodey was all around the world chasing the Mandarin at the time, and thus not really an option. You could also infer that SHIELD is not affiliated with the American government at all, and since its mandate are those threats – extraterrestrial or otherwise – that ordinary forces can’t handle, it has no part in dealing with this particular brand of terrorist. After all, if the United States killed Osama bin Laden eventually, it stands to reason that you save the Avengers for when things are dropping out of the sky with lasers and shit. Iron Patriot is obviously being painted (literally) as a 21st Century Captain America, but SHIELD (and specifically Hawkeye, Black Widow and presumably Captain America) are not at the beck and call of Uncle Sam. I suspect a lot of people won’t infer that. But you’d think that the presumed death of Tony Stark would be of more than passing interest to Nick Fury; instead, this is the first time he doesn’t crop up in an Iron Man picture.

Still, set that aside. They could have gone a whole ‘nother way with Extremis – in the comics, Extremis was something that allowed Tony Stark to keep key components of the Iron Man suit inside himself. Hollows of the bones, or something. Instead, they kept it basic and made the suit do its thing with the cunning use of subcutaneous implants of the sort of wristband-thingys that the Mark VII suit relied on last time out. Okay, broadly feasible. Some of that seems to have trickled down to the other suits as well, because the whole “retract your way in and out of them more or less at will” seems to apply to several others, despite the pretense at the beginning that the Mark XLII represented a new step forward. And then there’s JARVIS remote-controlling the suits except when Tony is doing it himself…which doesn’t explain why the Iron Patriot armor (which doesn’t seem to have the JARVIS link) could then be used as a flying truck to stuff a kidnapped person in under the remote control of AIM or whoever. Setting aside the fact that the percentage power on each suit is purely a function of whatever the plot demands and is decidedly non-linear…

…hold it.

One of the things I found so annoying about Transformers was that Bay et al made such a big deal of the robots being exactly proportional, that this robot is made up of the same amount of parts and space and etc that the vehicle is. And yet, apparently an old VW Bug and a new Chevy Camaro are the same size. Or a robot that has to make the iconic noise while transforming can crouch completely silently behind a house. Or a huge cube that they had to hide by building Hoover Dam around it can suddenly be reduced to the size of a basketball.

There is a certain threshold of willing-suspension-of-disbelief that goes along with any movie. If you see When Harry Met Sally, for instance, you are able to suspend disbelief to the extent that you accept that Meg Ryan would ever find Billy Crystal attractive. If Carrie Fisher had ended the argument about the wagon-wheel table by telekinetically lifting it and smashing Bruno Kirby through the living room window with it…that would not have worked, because that’s beyond the accepted threshold of disbelief for that movie.

The problem with movies like this is that they have to play by their rules as they establish them. You want me to believe that there’s an all-powerful Force that binds the universe together and can be manipulated by those strong in it? Okay, your story, your rules. If in the fifth Star Wars movie, Anakin Skywalker could suddenly use the Force to teleport himself from Alderaan to Tattooine – nope. That’s beyond the threshold. To put it in terms even a kindergartener should understand, you can draw the lines wherever you like, but when you’re done, you have to color inside them.

When Bobby Petrino was fired at Arkansas after some extremely public malfeasance with a woman not his wife, culminating in a motorcycle wreck, one SEC coach anonymously said “You can get away with pushing the envelope if you’re winning, but my God, Bobby was wipin’ his ass with the envelope.” You can teeter right up to the line if you establish that it’s out there in the first place. The problem is, we have three movies establishing where the lines are for Iron Man, and by the last twenty minutes of the film I got the feeling Shane Black found himself without a roll of Charmin and started looking around.

And that’s where the other Transformers problem comes into play (actually there are three, but the third – needless additional subplots that ultimately have no bearing on the actual thrust of the movie – is thankfully not a factor here). The final battle is too damn crowded. Iron Man vs Iron Monger is manageable. The big final set piece in Iron Man 2 is straightforward enough. Even the Battle of New York in the Avengers is well-choreographed and easy enough to follow. What we end up with at the end of Iron Man 3 is a brawl on the docks, in the dark, with thirty flying suits that we can barely even see or make any sense of. Maybe some of the serious comic nerds will piece together one or another, but in the end, it’s just big, noisy, loud, messy, and tough to keep score on. It’s about what you’d expect from the man who dropped Lethal Weapon on an unsuspecting world, but the thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that we’ve come to expect a little better, slightly smarter grade of mayhem from its various denouments.

Other than that…it could be worse. There are some particularly good character swerves to keep people on their toes, and fans of the old comic book will be particularly surprised at the ultimate machinations of the Mandarin and confused by the ultimate disposition of the Ten Rings. That’s not a problem for me; it’s easy enough to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a separate self-contained canon (and one that heretofore has been expertly streamlined and simplified for mainstream consumption; these movies have done more to drive attention to those properties than Ultimate Marvel ever did). It’s nice to see our old friends together, and especially nice to see Tony and Rhodey in that sort of buddy-relationship we always knew had to be there but never got to see in the first two movies due to the basic conflict.

I need to see it again and see what I think. Ultimately I suppose I’m on board, but unless something clicks for me, it’s not the direction I would have taken.

…I would love to see a mass uprising of “Christians” outraged about poverty. Or hunger. Or the corrosive effect of great wealth. Or anything that actually appears in the four canonical Gospels, or anything at all, really – just something that puts them on monkey tilt to one-quarter the degree that the existence of homosexuality appears to.  Seriously, in a world of hunger, poverty, abuse, neglect, the Hobbesian “poor nasty brutish and short” of life, why do “The Christians” only get bent out of shape about The Gay?

Part of the problem with Christianity is that for the better part of two thousand years, huge swaths of it have been administered from the top.  And the Gospel is about those on the bottom. Sell all you have and follow Him.  Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The backlash against the authority of the Pharisees, the Saducees, the priests and the scribes of the Temple.  This is why at heart I still sympathize with the thrust of what was originally the Baptist mission: priesthood of the believer, independence of individual church congregations, power and authority and doctrine flowing up rather than down.  By this logic, of course, the Southern Baptist Convention ceased to actually be Baptist by 1990, but I digress.

Here’s the thing: a religion that exists for those on the bottom cannot be administered by those whose interest lies primarily in keeping them there.  The letters of Paul said there is no more slave and free, we are all brothers together in Christ.  And yet the Confederacy came up with all manner of Biblical justification for why that didn’t actually count for, you know, slaves.

But no, it’s all about TEH GHEYS.  If I see one more Tweet, Facebook status, Instagram post, whatever – if one more person wails about how Jason Collins comes out as gay and gets praised while Tim Tebow gets persecuted for his faith, I will fucking lose my shit. Top tip, holy rollers: Tim Tebow isn’t being persecuted for his Christianity. He’s being mocked because no amount of piety makes up for being the worst quarterback in the NFL not called Rex Grossman. (Seriously, what is it with former Gator QBs who suck out loud at the next level?)  If your job is “quarterback,” you can try to change the job description to “Christian quarterback,” but being great at the first won’t cut any ice with your employer if you’re no good at the latter.

Take a hint, Timmy: the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for forty years. You can at least condescend to one season in Montreal and see what happens.  You could even stuff the whole paycheck in your Lottie Moon envelope and think of it as one big act of foreign missionary work.  And for the rest of you: go back and make a list of all the times Jesus mentions the gays, then make a list of all the times he mentions the poor – and see if you can learn to prioritize like Him.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has released its 2013 “Who Has Your Back?” report.  They evaluate tech companies on “which companies help protect your data from the government” – whether the company fights for users’ privacy rights in legislation and in court, whether users are told about government data requests, whether they require a warrant for content, etc etc. Not surprisingly, AT&T and Verizon do horribly (one star between them out of a possible 6 each) while Dropbox and Google pull five each and Twitter gets all six.  Nicely done…

…but it kind of misses the point.

There is a sort of neo-libertarian ethos in Silicon Valley that says that the government is ultimately your enemy, that only private innovation can save us all.  You need to be safe from the prying eyes of Uncle Sam.  As for the prying eyes of Mark Zuckerberg, or Scott McNealy (who famously said “you have no privacy. Get over it”) or the Beast of Mountain View…well, that’s something else entirely, isn’t it?

Not really. As a test, I’ve been using the new Google Now function for iOS with my dummy Google account.  It doesn’t have any calendar data, I don’t get email there, and I rarely if ever log in for search (anywhere), but it does have location data turned on.  So far, all I get is an occasional weather update (of varying accuracy), location-specific transit timetables (which are actually right handy at a glance) and a constant slew of Zagat cards for local dining establishments – which would probably be more useful if I was anywhere but work and home this week.  Maybe this weekend I can see how it looks.

But that’s the thing: the new Silicon Valley Web 3.0 lifestyle requires that you entrust private companies with your data.  None more than Google and Facebook, whose entire current business models fall apart without your constant contribution of personalized information.  I don’t know offhand of any EFF report on which companies protect your data from the depredations of the private sector, but right now, I suspect a lot of companies would have a lot of explaining to do.  For instance, after their latest bout of WTFery, I dumped Path.  Not because they did something awful – it seems like this latest stink about spamming was a result of poorly-chosen defaults, user cluelessness, slow networks and the oddity of texting landlines in the UK.  But coupled with their automatic harvesting of the address book last year or so, it suggests a company that is at best careless about their use of your data.

This valley needs a good solid industry-wide policy about what companies can do with your data.  Whether they can share it internally between products (is it OK for Google to go through your email and find flight data to remind you about?) or sell it along to other companies (looking at you, Facebook) or keep it seemingly in perpetuity (back at you, Google).  Look at that EFF list again: Amazon got two stars and Apple only one, but they’re also the only companies on the list whose business is based primarily on selling you actual things.  The others are either selling you an OS (Microsoft), selling you access to the network (AT&T, Verizon, Sonic.net), or – this is the important bit – providing you with some sort of service that’s free at the point of use.  If they’re not making money by selling something to you, they need to sell something to somebody to make their money.

This is another place where William Gibson had it right: in the long run, corporate dystopia is far more likely than government dystopia. Right now, the feds have a lot more limits on what they can do with your data than Google does.  Uncle Sam needs a warrant; Google can just point to your login and say “you consent to a worldwide irrevocable license to harvest your organs and sell the contents of your brain.”  The Bill of Rights lacks ambiguity.  The EULA lives by it.  It’s past time for a tech sector that scorns lawyerly jargon and obtuse legislation to live by its own ranting.

The six-part National Geographic Channel series “The 80s: The Decade That Made Us” was something I was a little wary about when I first heard it promoted. For one thing, it reeked of “I Love The 80s” and for another, it’s bang on time to be the exact same sort of annoying “NOTHING WAS EVER EVER THE SAME” Baby Boomer bullshit we’ve been hearing for…well, about fifty years now.

It turned out pretty good, not least because of the crisply ironic narration by Rob Lowe (I didn’t think it was possible to laugh so hard at a mere ‘thank you’) but largely because they skipped going by year. Instead, they went with broader thematic episodes, starting with the malaise of 1980 that led to Reagan’s election in the first place and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the entirely-persuasive argument that pop culture is what brought down the Soviet Empire (granted, the shortcomings of Communism and the disguised internal rot of the USSR’s economy didn’t help).  Along the way, they looked at MTV, Madonna, the emergence of the cell phone and the arrival of computers on desktops, the creation of the cliffhanger as the indispensable end-of-season dramatic TV device…

The annoying thing about the 60s is that they always get the ham-handed booming “THIS IS THE DECADE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING” treatment, usually with Buffalo Springfield or Jimi Hendrix in the background. They changed a lot, sure.  But Vietnam didn’t serve as enough of a cautionary tale to prevent Iraq, and the expansion of social programs of the 1960s has been going the other way for quite some time.  Only in the field of civil rights do you see the slow widening of the American circle still happening, and there’s a case to be made that time takes care of that anyway (how many people still look at Irish or Italians as an “ethnic minority” with racial prejudice as an obstacle to their progress?) – not to deny the impact of a black President within living memory of Birmingham’s dogs and firehoses.

But the old firm nailed this one: the 80s were the decade that made today.  Hell, the entire GOP platform is built on the (hazy) memory of Ronald Reagan, or at least what they thought Reagan stood for. Cut taxes, always. Robust aggressive foreign policy, everywhere. Make America look as much like 1955 as possible.  As it was in the 80s, so today. Similarly, the promotion of individual achievement at the expense of collective good – definitely 80s. The apotheosis of true American working people stopped being the blue-collar hardhat and started being the yuppie.  The man at the top is far more to be admired than his staff and employees.  For crying out loud, Donald Trump is still afflicting us thirty years on.  Will no one rid me of this meddlesome onion-loaf-hair-having jackass?

Personal computers and mobile phones weren’t invented in the 1980s, but they were first made commercially practical – which puts us on the road to the iPhone. Popular music in its current form relies on MTV visuals and hip-hop beats, both of which came into the view of mainstream America in the 1980s.  What are Katy Perry and Lady Gaga if not an extended pastiche of Madonna? The modern concept of protest, of charity, of collective action – draw a straight line from merely buying a record to merely retweeting a hashtag.  80s.

There was, however briefly, a bit of a 60s moment in the early 90s.  We acted like we cared about the planet for about a year and a half. We made a big show of disdaining the greed and excess of the Me Decade.  We elected a couple of children of the 60s as young dynamic types to be our Democratic ticket for President.  And then the other side went right back to fighting the same battles of the 60s, which will apparently always be with us.  And all you need is Rambo to show that refighting the 60s in perpetuity is itself a child of the 1980s.

The 80s made us?  We still live there. Mostly for worse.

 

The height of irony: Tim Tebow, who made a bigger deal of his faith than any athlete in recent memory, gets cut by the Jets on the same day that Jason Collins becomes the first active openly gay athlete in a Big Four league sport. No doubt this will be heralded as another sign of the apocalypse by the holy rollers and their enablers in the media.  Yet the thing people fail to grasp is this: people don’t hate Tim Tebow because of his faith, they hate Tim Tebow because ESPN was using the word “Tebow” 88 times an hour on Sportscenter in a year where he scored exactly as many NFL touchdowns as my wife did.  There has never been a bigger delta between hype and performance that I can remember – at least during Linsanity, another prominently Christian athlete was running up sick numbers for the Knicks.

The problem with the holy rollers is that by their logic, Tim Tebow is a God-fearing Christian man who takes every opportunity to witness and share the Word of God with his own testimony, and therefore the fact that in three years he delivered a turnover for every two touchdowns and averaged less than 50% complete passing is immaterial. And that’s not how the NFL works. Hell, that’s not how sports works.  People didn’t want Jackie Robinson in the major leagues at first, and then the Dodgers got really good really fast.  People didn’t want Alabama to field black players, but then they rattled off three national titles in the 1970s (and should have had a fourth).  People didn’t want an influx of Russians in the NHL, until they turned Detroit into the Death Star. 

Sports may be the only field of human endeavor where who you are becomes immaterial.  You a Muslim? You Chinese? You gay? You could be a blue-skinned mutant with two husbands, but if you go to Chicago, hit .450 with 80 home runs and lead the Cubs to World Series victory for the first time since 1908, you will be the god of the North Side for the rest of your breathing days.  I assure you that there will be a shrine in my living room to whoever delivers to Vanderbilt a national championship in football (and the aforementioned wife probably has wireframes for the corresponding shrine to whoever delivers Rose Bowl victory to Cal), and it’s not going to matter to me whether the guy was purple or Chinese or Baptist or whatever – he got the job done and we got the ring.

And ultimately that’s what did for Tim Tebow in the NFL. The only thing pro football wants from a quarterback on Sunday is 350 yards and 3 touchdowns.  Everything and anything else you might do on Sunday might score points with God, but those don’t show up on the scoreboards of the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE.

With the exception of 8th grade, during what it took me twenty-two years to figure out was my first actual bout of chronic depression, spring was always a good time for me from the onset of adolescence to the end of high school.  The odd-numbered years were always progressively better, certainly, but by and large spring was good.  It meant an end to the steady gray rain and cold.  It meant pastel colors, warmth in the afternoon and a pleasant morning cool that didn’t demand a jacket, a general green-ness to a world that had been dead and brown for months.  Sure, it meant bushel baskets of pollen, but that was never quite as bad so long as I stayed away from the billowing yellow clouds from the trees and begged off cutting the grass.

I know that spring and summer 1989 get referenced endlessly as the perfect time in my life – had my crew, had the (complicated) affections of a sweet young thing (or two, kind of), had the kind of success where you always blurt out the right answer as if by Jedi mind trick and don’t think twice.  In a way, though – and unlike 1994 or 2003 or 2006 –  I had more than just that.  In retrospect, I knew I was doing well. I wasn’t moping over the lost opportunities of the past, because there really weren’t any and they didn’t matter anyway – I wasn’t pining for the days of being the biggest dork in day care.  Nor was I dwelling endlessly on the future and pinning my hopes on getting out and taking the next step – looking forward to college?  Absolutely, but not with one foot out the door.  The future?  Hell, ten weeks away was future far enough.

In a way that took me 25 years to recognize, I was living in the moment.  I knew that I was living in an amazing time for me, I soaked it up, I cherished it, I wrung every last drop of life from it.  And I wonder if that isn’t what keeps that era resonant, a quarter-century on: I was living wide-open and flat-out and was fully present for all of it.

Of course, by the next spring, it had all gone to pieces.  I was feuding with most of my class, all my friends had graduated the year before, one of the sweet young things turned out to be a figment of my imagination while the other vanished to be replaced by a poorly-programmed clone. And the bulletproof victory streak ran out by the end of February, leaving me to coast to the finish line with an empty tank…but I didn’t care, because by that time I was looking to the future.  The present might kinda suck, but that’s fine, because come September I won’t care about high school at all.  And so I suppose in a way I did live in the moment a little, as I motored around that summer soaking in the way things had been until now, thinking it would all be different come fall.

You all know how that turned out.  It’s not much fun to live in the moment when the moment sucks out loud, and I pretty much forgot how.  Fast-forward twenty-five years.  It’s spring now.  The jacket is fully optional.  The Sperrys are out from under the foot of the bed and the socks are back in the drawer. The three new shirts are button-ups from Tommy Hilfiger, one a pink-and-white stripe and the others a mostly-white-with-pastel-plaiding. I can hear and feel the echoes across the years.

There are plenty of guys who wander around dwelling on their high school years and wishing they were that again. That’s not what I’m after.  God knows I don’t want to be 17 again, least of all in a world of living at home with no Internet or iPhone or Silicon Valley money.  But if I could get my head back to thinking how I did in high school, living not like I did but how I did…that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?

And the compromise Toomey-Manchin bill – the simplified background check bill, the one proposed by one Democrat with an A rating from the NRA and one Republican, the one that included prison terms for any government official retaining those records – goes down to defeat, 54 to 46.  That’s 54 votes in favor of the bill and 46 against it, so by 21st century Senate rules, that means the side with 54 votes is the loser.

As with so many things over the last five years, the person to blame for this is Harry Reid, who after 2011-12 had no reason whatsoever to leave the old filibuster rules intact.  It’s not like we didn’t know the GOP had shattered the filibuster record in three consecutive Congresses, except we totally did.  Instead, the Man With No Balls let himself get rolled again, and again, and again, and a Senate with a Democratic majority is completely unable to pass a Democratic bill.  

Then again, if Republicans didn’t live in pants-shitting fear of the NRA, this wouldn’t be an issue.  But that shouldn’t be a surprise either.  After all, pants-shitting fear is what it means to be a Republican, ever since an attack on New York and Washington DC made red America soil its britches.

We get the government we deserve.  Twenty dead kids is the price of doing business, because we as a nation are too chickenshit to take on the chickenshits.

“I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law…”

…down by the banks of the river Charles

that’s where you’ll find me, ‘long with muggers, lovers and thieves

(yeah but they’re good people)

well I love that dirty water, oh Boston you’re my home

 

This is always a big day for Boston.  The Red Sox have a dispensation from Major League Baseball to always play at home on Patriots Day and to start at 11 AM so the game lets out in time for the crowd to see the marathon pass through Kenmore Square behind Fenway (even if the scheduling has been screwed up some in recent years).  It’s a state holiday, it’s a three-day weekend, it’s the essential sign of spring.  And now, this shit.

Twitter is how we find out about these things now, and I’m not checking Twitter every five seconds since my thumb joints started to hurt in the afternoons, so it took a text message before I pulled away from a busy and annoying day at work to see what was up.  And I know what day it is, and my first thought was Oklahoma City.  Then Judge Vance, before that. Olympic Park. The women’s clinic in Birmingham. I mean, comment-section idiots can say what they like, but I’m from Birmingham, and when a bomb goes off? Spoiler alert, my first thought isn’t brown people.

It’s all speculation, of course, idle and ill-informed (but given the anniversaries that Patriots’ Day commemorates in New England, it’s better-informed than the typical Facebook poster) – as much as it hurts to admit, we won’t know anything worth knowing for at least 24 hours and more like 48. Until then, you can only do the usual: pray, and line up to give blood.  As badly as they butchered my apheresis for platelets a couple weeks ago, I’ll probably be lined up with everybody else tomorrow or Wednesday, sticking out an arm still purple with bruises, because it’s important.

I’ll also be steering clear of TV news.  TV news is like my mother: they may not have anything useful to say, and what they have to say my be wildly counter-productive, but far worse would be to preserve any kind of dignified silence. So I’m going to spare myself the annoyance of mouths running for the sake of running them, and I suggest you do the same.  Hell, a blog post is probably too much.

It was recently made clear to me that I spend rather too much time on Twitter. This point was driven particularly home when I dumped Twitter off my iPhone for two days. Not only did I not have to plug the phone in at work once, not only did I carry on using everything else like normal (including podcasts and playing music for most of the day), but when I left work I was still at 50% battery. Clearly, something is amiss with Twitter. It could be the app itself, but I think it’s the fact that checking Twitter like I tend to check Twitter means the screen is constantly on and the network is constantly refreshing.

Others (like Mat Honan and Ezra Klein) have written better about the firehose quality of Twitter and how it’s become progressively more difficult to drink from. I only routinely monitor about three accounts of my own. One is the (locked) original account, mostly just my actual friends. One is entirely for Vanderbilt purposes. The other, and effectively the primary one, is a catchall for everything – acquaintances from the days of all-day EDSBS comment sessions, assorted Redskins, critical bloggers and sites, parody accounts, authors, radio hosts…basically it’s a distilled stream of my Internet and broader interests, some 300 sources strong, spraying at full power pretty much all day every day. And like the early days of email, there’s the little endorphin hit that goes along with hitting “refresh” – less because maybe this time you’ll have something (oh, the agony of watching that Eudora progress bat at 14.4K waiting for the FROM header) and more wondering what you’ll have with this reload.

Ironically, the “Top News” feature I decried in Facebook is exactly what I need in Twitter. In Facebook, where the people I follow are actually my friends and number less than a hundred, I want to see everything they put up. On Twitter, where I’m following almost five hundred people between three different accounts, I would be fine with something that just hit the high points for the primary account and still let me look at the personal account Tweet by Tweet.

The problem now is that a technical fix may not be easy to come by. Twitter is slowly cutting off the oxygen to third-party clients, so coming up with a solution in software will largely depend on whether Twitter wants to offer one. It’s tough for me to imagine that something like that is too far off, though – the ability to charge people for pride of place on the pile is too good a revenue opportunity to relinquish, especially in a world where “promoted tweets” are already a (grudgingly) accepted part of the ecosystem.

(In non-tweet related technical news, today is a red-letter day: U-Verse access has just gone live on WatchESPN for iOS. For the first time, it’s possible to watch any games ESPN is offering online via my iPhone or iPad…and even stream them to the TV via the AppleTV unit. Given the nature of Vanderbilt athletics and SEC television contracts, I can now basically count on seeing any televised Commodores game on any device – no longer does it mean digging out the laptop and crouching around it. The last major obstacle to an iPad as my sole personal portable computing solution has been surmounted. This is what Vice President Biden would call “a big fucking deal.” Of which more later.)