Are my eyes really blue?

The car has a bad transmission, which is a sealed unit and will cost $6000 to replace. That’s bad arithmetic in a car that’s going on ten years old and over 100K miles and barely gets 23 miles per gallon at the best of times, and that’s before you consider that the speakers are randomly static-laden and the sunroof occasionally goes half-up of its own volition and the car stereo is iPod-era and doesn’t work well with the iPhone.  It’s one of those things where there’s so much to fix and straighten up that you despair of fixing it at all – and the promise of being able to find something at least partly electrical is very attractive.

Right now, the three contenders are the Prius V, the newest Chevy Volt, and the Ford Fusion Energi. The Prius is just as it says: big hybrid wagon, proven technology. But ultimately fuel-burning; there’s no all-electric option there.  The Volt will go all-electric for 50 miles, which is enough to get to a Cal game or up to the city – and if you don’t find a charger, you still have the gas generator charging you back up, with an ultimate range far enough to drive to Disneyland on a tank. Splitting the difference is the Fusion Energi – only about 20 miles all-electric, but enough for me to go to work and back or for us to get groceries or run the quick errands without having to dip into the gas motor. 

Personally, the Volt is at the top of my list, but I haven’t sat in one or driven it or anything – but I do really like the idea of an American-made electrical vehicle (and a Chevy at that, given that my family literally bought nothing else from 1969 to 1993) without the complexity of a six-speed transmission to deal with and with support for Apple CarPlay and modern phone integration. But with the others, I also like the idea of a car that I know I’ll have room to sit in and have a grown-up midsize ride.

And that’s the thing – I’m starting to get like that with the house. The facing on the cabinets is peeling, the carpet on the stairs needs to be cleaned if not replaced outright, one of the toilets makes a noise and another has a rickety seat and has to have the handle held down to flush, and the whole thing needs a massive allergen flush to get the dust out so I can start breathing through the night normally. (Maybe.) Things being how they are, though, it’s not like we can sell the house and start over somewhere else; unless you bought AAPL at $15 in 1997 and sold it all six months ago, the only way you sell a piece of property in Silly Con Valley is if you’re leaving for good and never coming back.

And in a way, I suppose I’m a little like that about myself. I’ve been dealing with this sleep study and its aftermath for months now – what started off as a “am I sleeping wrong on this shoulder and causing my neck/shoulder pain that way?” turned into claustrophobic masks and allergy shots and a million wires in my scalp, and even now, when I can finally just barely make it through the entire night without ripping the BiPAP mask off my face, I’m not sleeping any more soundly or waking up any less, which begs the question whether the sleep clinic knows how to do any more than “positive air pressure”. I genuinely suspect they don’t, which makes me wonder how I’m ever going to property evaluate things like posture and head elevation and whether I need a different pillow or mattress or God knows what. The shoulder still hurts, by the way, and there’s been a recurring pain in the left hamstring for a while now and we haven’t yet sorted out what the deal is with the dust allergy and whether that’s helping or not, and my heart rate and blood pressure and cholesterol are all elevated from even four years ago and only respond sporadically to changes in diet and exercise, if at all.

As with so many things, the problem is that when there’s too many things to fix, you despair of ever being able to get them all fixed, which in turn leads to despairing of getting any of them fixed.  And it’s often tough to undertake a new approach when it’s going to be a long time before you see results, if ever, and then ask why you gave up this food or that drink or did this much extra exercise only to see your LDL or triglyceride numbers budge not at all. It’s not just energy of activation that’s tough to overcome, it’s the willingness to try something new that’s going to take take a lot of time and effort and isn’t guaranteed to pay off in the end.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have any hobbies. Or why I’m not a gamer. Actually there are plenty of reasons for that, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s strange how some things (take, as a completely random example, all American football) can put you in an incredibly shitty mood for no apparent reason (okay, because it strikes at deeper emotions about your place in the world and the state of our civilization, but bugger all that for now) and some other things (like, say, the right pair of boots and the right jacket and the right song randomly coming up on the iPhone) can put you in a good mood…and what do you do? You question WHY you’re in a good mood all of a sudden.

This, bluntly put, is incredibly fucked up. If there’s one thing I like to think I’ve figured out in the last ten years, it’s that life is poor, nasty, brutish and short, tomorrow isn’t promised to you, and you need to indulge in the things you enjoy and stop doing the things that make you miserable. So if some combination of Aldens and second-hand Navy peacoat and a random Irish song combine and put a smile on your face, the thing to do isn’t to mourn how that public house isn’t there any more and you haven’t seen most of that gang in person for years and there’s nothing like that here…the thing to fucking do is to bathe in the warm glow of your memories and take that energy and point it toward laying waste to all in your path and bringing honor and pride to the memory of the rifles of the EUS.

If you’re happy, stop fucking asking why.

It’s almost over with, and not a minute too soon. The NFL gets its slime on enough without adding a soupçon of inconvenience, and this has been a rough week for the train and the traffic and everything else. I just came from two hours of additional walking patrol to be eyes and ears for the cops so that nothing untoward happens, and the road closures are bad enough without the fact the light rail has been commandeered for stadium travel only. If you normally take the VTA train, you’re on a bus bridge today, and good luck finding it.

And for all of this, I still have a rooting interest, despite my determination not to watch a minute of the game – I want Denver to lose, partly because of residual venom when I backed them only for them to shit the bed against the Niners, but largely because I don’t want to have to put up with the avalanche of Peyton Manning fellatio if he falls ass-backward into another ring through no fault of his own. One more loss in the championship should shut that down quickly, and offer the added attraction of the hidebound NFL and its media apologists losing their shit over Cam Newton.

Which is its own problem – I love what Cam Newton does for the league, or to it, but I resent the fact that he’s the living breathing incarnation of why Vanderbilt’s ceiling is nine wins once a century or so. Which is one of the things that made Vandy football so difficult to watch last year and this, and why I largely punched out on college football.  Now I find myself doing the same thing with basketball – partly because Kevin Stallings is past his sell-by date as head coach and excels at making a nickel out of twenty-five cents, but largely because the SEC cares about one thing and basketball isn’t it – and the caliber of officiating and decision-making reflects that, especially when the ref show blows for 52 fouls in a 40 minute game.

So what does that leave me with? At least we’re competitive in baseball. Plus, there are a handful of teams and sports that I can engage in and root for without being emotionally over-involved.  Baseball is at the top of the list, just because you can’t get too high or too low when you have a hundred and sixty-something games to get through in six months. The expectations for the Oakland A’s are about right too; with the Giants having three World Series wins in five seasons, it’s starting to feel a bit like rooting for the house. But the San Jose Giants are immense fun to go watch in person, as are the San Jose Earthquakes. As is the English Premier League, for that matter, and despite all these years of trying I still don’t have a team I’d rather pull for than Fulham, so I don’t have to be too too stuck into any particular result.

And then there’s the Warriors, Golden State and Santa Cruz alike. That’s a pretty easy lift when they’re defending champs and Golden State is on course to set records for season victories and home winning streak and Steph Curry is the most electrifying man in sports, but I’m not under any illusion that’ll last forever…so just enjoy it while it does. Sadly, though, the featured sports of college athletics are pretty much a no-go zone these days. It’s unfortunate, but it’s what self-care and mental health require.

So it looks like March 15 will be the event in which Apple unveils the next round of stuff: new Watch information (and possibly new bands), an iPad Air 3 with some sort of compatibility with the Pro’s accessories and special features, and of course the much-debated iPhone 5SE, so-called, which the Great Mentioner now thinks will be running the chipset of the iPhone 6S alongside the camera of the 6 and the form factor, more or less, of the 5S (or perhaps the current iPod Touch).  The logic behind giving it the 6S chipset is that Apple doesn’t want to produce a new phone which will be two generations behind current come September, so we will presumably get to Columbus Day with all Apple phone offerings running either the A9 or the notional A10 in the notional iPhone 7.

And the rumors are flying about that – now in addition to the absence of a traditional headphone jack, we are asked to believe that wireless charging (at some distance, no less) are part of the package for the 7. It’s starting to sound like Jony Ive is serious about creating the Movie Phone – complete slick and modern and no wires ever and is never plugged in and magically juices up. It’s a nice thought. I’m not sure it’s what I want to gamble on just yet. Having the wireless tethering to the watch and Bluetooth headphones has already proven harsh on the battery without having to stand within a foot of the magic pad to get some charge back in the damn thing.

In a lineup like that, too, the 5SE moniker makes even less sense.  If the phone is a smaller version of the 6S without TouchID (and a 8 MP camera rather than 12), why not just say 6C and make it “compact” rather than “cheap”, have the 6S and 6S Plus, and then the 7? Why stick to the 5 numbering at all? I’m trusting that this will all get cleaned up sometime in the next five weeks.

But the big thing is this: I have to hold off on buying any of this nonsense. I have batteries lying around everywhere (I think I may own at least three lipstick chargers plus the external case) and my iPhone 6 through work is unlocked, so there is no percentage in buying this notional new iPhone until proven by experiment and math that the newer chipset and smaller screen actually work out to superior battery life.  Otherwise, there are much better things I can burn this $650 of walking-around money on, mostly in London…

 

EDITED TO ADD: So at lunchtime today I finally had the opportunity to handle the much-debated Apple Smart Battery Case with an actual iPhone 6S in it. For as much abuse as Apple’s taken over this product, it’s been all in the wrong direction; everyone went mental about the “hump” in back.  Well, spoiler alert: the hump means that the edges are just the same as they would be normally, and the hump fits in (but doesn’t fill in my case) the hollow in your hand while holding the phone. No other battery case I’ve ever used on any iPhone was able to accomplish that (although the Moto X did it internally, with a terrace-stepped battery in the rounded body of the phone itself).  And the practical upshot is that with the Apple case, it’ll draw all its power from the case first and leave the phone fully charged, rather than having to use the case to charge the phone at diverse times. 

The biggest shame on this case is its necessity, not its implementation. The implementation is surprisingly good. It’s only because I’ve already spent that $100 on all the above-mentioned external batteries than I don’t spend it on this.

So on Saturday (really on Friday night), I switched SIM cards in my phones. The iPhone 6, freshly unlocked, took a turn on T-Mobile while my daily driver AT&T account ran through my first-gen Moto X. I only bothered for about a day, but it was terribly illuminating.

For starters, the AT&T Moto X didn’t have any appreciably better battery life than when it was on T-Mobile. I didn’t do any music playback from it, but it was fully charged at 9:30 AM and was down to below 15% battery by 7 PM. I didn’t think I was hitting it particularly hard, either, but with no music happening everything I was doing was hitting the screen, which is the biggest draw in any phone. Meanwhile, the T-Mobile-equipped iPhone 6 was pulling upward of 68 Mbps data download on LTE and seemingly offered plenty of signal anywhere other than on base at Moffett, which is a bad spot for signal for anyone. 

But more alarming was Sunday after I’d switched back. I did some audio playback but not that much – but in the span of maybe five hours off the plug and about three and a quarter hours total use, the iPhone 6 dropped to about 15% battery life. If I had to pin it down to one thing, I’d say it was Twitter, because that was the biggest battery killer while we were in Maui last week. Fortunately, the wife came through with the battery pack I’d loaner her for her day in San Francisco, or I would have had to call it a night and go home at 5:30 PM. But to only get four hours of actual screen time off a phone is kind of a problem.

The Hawaii test worked out reasonably well – I had the external battery case, which is a bulky plastic thing that holds about 3000 mAh and is good for charging the phone from 20% to 80% twice. As long as I can plug it in every night, I ought to be OK with that abroad – bearing in mind that I was never using it for Kindle and precious little audio (other than in flight). But Safari, Tweetbot, Instagram, even Mail – all burn 1% of battery every three minutes of use, seems like, and Reeder even slightly more. I think it’s reasonable to assume in London that in addition to social media and photography, we can expect to hit transit and mapping apps pretty hard (there wasn’t much call for it in Hawaii on account of either driving everywhere or laying out by the pool. Transit wasn’t a thing). More to the point: that bulky plastic case sucks. It’s huge in the pocket and impossible to get on and off the phone (unless you drop it, in which instance it flies apart in two pieces). On the other hand it basically means you only have to take the micro-USB charger. If I want to take an external battery, it’ll mean having a Lightning cable AND a micro-USB if I want to charge both at once.

And here’s the wild card: that iPhone 5se is still out there, notionally packing the same camera and chipset as the iPhone 6 I currently carry but in a 4-inch form factor that represents a display 37% smaller (and presumably less power-consuming) with a larger battery than the original iPhone 5S.  Depending on who you believe, more than half the people currently carrying an iPhone 5S are contract-eligible to upgrade, but haven’t – because nobody makes a 4-inch premium phone anymore.  The battery of the 5se, so-called, is allegedly 1642 mAh, which puts it almost halfway between the 5S and the 6S, but driving a 5S display and 6 chipset. Since the battery size went up 16% from the 5S to the 6, and the screen became 50% larger, the fact that advertised battery life went up slightly in the 6 is suggestive that the same chipset with a smaller display and larger battery than the 5S will yield legit battery life improvements over the 6 and 6S. And if nothing else, I’ll have two or three months to figure out whether this is true before travel time.

But the take-home message of the week and weekend is this: Android is no longer worth the squeeze. It’s nice to have a phone that feels smaller the way the X does, and I wish I had those kinds of features in an iPhone (2 GB RAM, 2200 mAh battery, and AMOLED display, for starters), but right now there’s no reason to rely on it in favor of the iPhone. I don’t know what changed aside from the new number and the unlock, but for whatever reason, I’m happy to just deal with the iPhone alone now.

So about three weeks ago, there was a brief Friday stir when a new app called Peach dropped. At least one website sardonically slagged it off as “the hottest new social media app of the afternoon,” and by Monday it had already been proclaimed dead. Naturally, I signed up for it, as did a couple of friends who sign up for everything that comes down the pipe just so they can have their login name.  And sure enough, of the four or five people I “followed” not one has put anything up in over a week, going on two. 

Social media has a problem. Twitter doesn’t seem to know what it’s for and insists on trying to become Facebook. Facebook wants to be AOL – basically the Internet for people who don’t understand how the Internet works – but is largely a place for baby pictures, game spam and the reposted screeds of racist relatives. Snapchat is for getting the coed in your freshman English comp lecture to send nudes. Instagram, at least, seems to know what lane it’s in and is mostly a photo-sharing service, although one where you’re almost obligated to have it autopost to Twitter.

And that’s the interesting thing. I will see the same things crop up three times sometimes: on the ‘Gram, in Twitter and in Facebook. Usually automatically, as if you have to cover your bases by making sure that it’ll go onto one of the services everyone has. Or maybe it’s just easier to have things automatically show up everywhere.  But it drives home the fact that if you’re on social media for the purpose of keeping up with friends you already have, you basically have to have a very tight and judiciously managed Facebook account – which in turn is the last thing on Earth that Facebook wants you to have.

Things come and go to try to deal with this. Google+ wanted you to organize everyone into circles, which was actually quite sensible, but Google didn’t have any more success convincing people that it wasn’t out to strip-mine your personal data. Path actually capped your friends list at 150 to make sure you were friending, well, friends – but it had an even worse time with data security and sank like a rock. And Peach got traction for about thirty seconds with another largely closed model.

Because the fact of the matter is this: Ed Earl Brown doesn’t want to have to check four apps over and over, and Facebook has the lowest barrier to entry for a civilian. You just fill in your real name, you can tell who the other people are, you’re encouraged to share everything, and let’s face it, Facebook is where the baby pictures are.  If you want to keep up with people you’ve met in real life, your actual friends, then beyond the age of about 28 you’re basically committed to Facebook as the option. That’s why all these other things – Google+, Path, Peach, and whatever comes up next week – sank like rocks. It’s how Friendster got smurfed by MySpace which in turn got destroyed by Facebook; in the end nobody wants to do more than one.

Because there’s another problem, and it is this: social media is inherently shallow. It’s a picture, it’s 140 characters, it’s emoji, it’s perfectly crafted to accommodate snark and shallow reaction. To quote someone more clever than me about these things, “Like anything else virtual…social media is an imperfect repository for the content it is fed, which doesn’t capture the essence of the people who use it.  It definitely doesn’t reflect the things that truly make us who we are – our hopes, fears, aspirations, and burdens.”  And an imperfect slice of the real world is a poor substitute for the real thing, especially when you’re not enough in the real world. Which is why the slugline for Peach made me stop and think…”Peach is a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.”

I’m not sure you can be yourself on the Internet anymore. After all, twenty years on, the reason I’m close to my dearest friends is because at some point we stopped being Internet friends and just became friends. Maintaining a shadow life for everyone else, especially in more than one place, is more trouble than it’s worth.  We keep getting an attempt at Peach or Path or Ello or Diaspora or (INSERT $TRENDYAPP HERE) because at some level we want to have a separate space for our actual friends, not just the voices in our phone. It’s how we end up with badly-curated Facebook filters and multiple Twitter accounts and a Peach login…but to get everyone on there is problematic and the edge cases are tough to judge (I really like this person’s Twitter but we’ve never met and I don’t even know their real name so do I want them in my Real Life Friend Space?) and…we all wind up back on Twitter and Facebook in the end.

I do want something like that.  Something ad-free, something without all the cruft of games and memes and reposts and stuff that your aunt forwards. For now, I have it in the form of two Twitter accounts, one identified as me and one not, both accessed primarily via Tweetbot, which are the only accounts that live on the phone. The larger and busier Twitter accounts where I follow and am followed by many more people? Those are only on the iPad or in the browser. The phone has become the bouncer…if only the battery would hold out all day, of which plinka plinka hee hawwww.

Well, we don’t know how the debate will go down for another couple hours at least, but one thing is for sure, the Clusterfuck to the 2016 GOP Presidential Nomination has gone what the wags at Every Day Should Be Saturday used to refer to as “Full Ham.” Last I saw, Donald “Il Douche” Trump had booked his own event, billing it as some sort of wounded warrior benefit and setting it up to compete with the Fox debate from which he ran like a scalded dog once he learned he would be exposed to the moon-goddess witchcraft of Megyn Kelly (as one person said, if you’re not going to have a last name could you at least spell both your first names right?), and at least one undercard-class debater (Hee Haw Huckabee WOOOOOOOO TENTH PLACE SOOOEY) will be joining him there.  Other candidates (including Carly “Demon Sheep” Fiorina and Ted “I’ve Picked Up All Ben Carson’s Holy Rollers So Don’t You Dare Call Me A Maple Beaver” Cruz) are offering millions of dollars in PAC money as charitable contributions to try to buy a 1:1 with His Hairpiece, and all we’ve really learned so far is that “Support The Troops” hasn’t yet yielded to “Support The Police” as the all-outs-in-free conservative shibboleth just yet.

Meanwhile, I wonder if any of the candidates will be asked about their support for the Vanilla ISIS contingent in Oregon which was not only so stupid that their entire leadership went on a long drive to a rally AND ANNOUNCED IT, but so stupid that those left behind were webcasting the aftermath and their planning ON A LIVE CAMERA complete with one donk with a text ringtone OF A SUPPRESSED GUNSHOT.  After all, Trump’s base voters are fair game for discussion, right?

This is no way to run an election, and Josh Marshall nails it once again: this is what he once indelicately referred to as the Bitch Slap Theory of Politics run wild. And that’s a crucial element of the Southern style of politics: you basically have to demonstrate dominance over your opponent in much the same way a rutting dog in the street might. You have to smack your opponent around and leave him unwilling to come back at you in the same fashion, which is why Dukakis lost horribly and Clinton won handily twice. And right now, this is The Donald basically carrying on a campaign in the same fashion as his WWF Wrestlemania appearances in the 1990s.

The critical thing is that not one single binding vote has been cast, in caucus or primary, to determine who will be the nominee.  Polling in Iowa is notoriously unreliable, and polling in general is in poor odor on the GOP side after the “unskewing” fiasco of three years ago, but Trump sits in the lead most anywhere and everywhere…but he has exactly no votes to show for it yet. No one has had their viability as a candidate marked to market yet, and we have Iowa and New Hampshire and most of the SEC yet to vote, all in a time period where we could either have the public tire of the clown show for good or else decide that it’s all right to select the leader of the free world with the equivalent of talk radio braggadocio and reality TV histrionics.

All of this, though – the election, the occupation in Oregon, the emerging Twitter phenomenon of the “Bernie Bro” (since no lessons were learned from Ralph Nader or Howard Dean or Jerry Brown or Walter Mondale, apparently), the general state of the online world and the angry electorate – so much of it comes back to one thing, to my mind anyway: society hasn’t come to grips with what it means to be a man in the 21st century, in a world where ethnic diversity and a changing economy and three waves of feminism have altered the fabric of what used to be reality. Time was, you graduated high school, you could get a job, get married, buy a house, raise a family and send your kids off to college with the promise of a better future.  You could support a family on one income, have a pension to retire on, and probably be assured of a steady job for thirty years.

Now, either you have a college degree and probably six figures of student loan debt to go with it, or  you’re scrambling for some sort of entry-level manual labor job, because the medium-sized businesses – what the Germans refer to as the Mittelstand – is largely hollowed out. There are small businesses, there are mega-coprorations, and the rank-and-file business in between has either been absorbed, acquired or plowed under. So when Donald Trump brays about making Apple build its products in America, he misses out on the fact that for fifteen years now, the entire supply chain for computer electronics has been in China. Components, assembly, all aspects of manufacturing: they aren’t done in America because for the most part they literally can’t be.  We don’t have the fabrication, we don’t have the tool and die operations, even the custom-assembled-in-Fort-Worth first-gen Moto X was put together from parts made in Shenzhen or thereabouts. And this happened because it was cheaper – and if it’s cheaper to move manufacturing halfway around the world, how much cheaper to move your pension obligations into some sort of stock market roulette and be spared that expense too? Wrap it all up in a blanket of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility, and the next thing you know, your parents are still living off their pension while you’re looking at a flatlining 401K and wondering how you’ll ever afford to send your kids to college. And if you’re young enough, you and your spouse are probably both working and looking at your loans and trying to decide which two out of three pieces of the American Dream you’ll take: kids, home ownership or financial stability.

And so guys fixate on the stupidest stuff imaginable. The felicitously-slurred “cosplatriots” of the Pacific Northwest are typical of their breed: aging white guys who want to need the guns and fancy themselves highly elite and specially trained and basically just the sort Blue Ant wanted to market to in William Gibson’s Zero History.  The keyboard commando warbloggers of a decade ago, and their bizarro-world “progressives” on Twitter sneering at anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as an agent of Trumpism, are the political equivalent of Gamergate neckbeards – all slurs and slander online from the safety of anonymity. Masculinity is reduced to whoever can be the biggest dick. I got mine, fuck you. It’s toxic and it’s unhelpful and it’s quite frankly unsustainable, because the same globalization that wiped out American manufacturing is now coming for American services. Being a big swinging dick with an MD won’t help you out much when the local HMO decides to cut costs by having some nice young person in Hyderabad look at your patient’s MRI over telepresence and make a diagnosis.

And as with so many things, the solution isn’t technological or even legal, it’s societal. Time was, being a loud-mouthed jackass who waved your money around made you kryptonite in polite society. Now it’s good for 41% in Iowa. People praise themselves for being “politically incorrect” in a fashion which thirty years ago would merely have been disposed of with the term “unmannerly.” And to hear its current defenders, the cause of free speech is only worthwhile if it’s protecting the right to racist and sexist abuse that would almost certainly have drawn a punch in the nose – or worse – in a pre-digital era.

Maybe we’re actually well overdue for a little fascism – albeit by way of Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt.

So my work-provided iPhone 6 is now unlocked. I don’t know what made it possible but for whatever reason, I asked for it and they did it and pop goes the weasel, I now have an unlocked phone capable of going abroad.

This changes things.

First off, I don’t need a different phone to be able to go to London and still be able to take good shots. I will probably buy a Three SIM right off the plane and be good to go – no need to buy a notional phone that doesn’t exist yet. I also have an external battery case for it, one that’s over 3000 mAh capacity. Since I won’t be syncing it to the Mac while out of the country, I can just leave the case on it and recharge it through the case with any micro-USB cable, which in turn means that I will almost certainly be just bringing a power brick, the iPhone, and the Kindle as a reading tool on the trip. The test is going to be in Hawaii – I will just take that loadout electronically, nothing else, and see how things go.

Which should be fine, honestly – I took the iPhone and Kindle to Japan for a couple of weeks and there wasn’t a problem.  That means one cable and one charger, and no messing with an external battery pack, and I just have one thing to fit in my pocket and be done with it. Which is what I wanted out of a new phone. And really, that’s it, isn’t it?  We got LTE in 2012, we got fingerprint readers in 2013, we got ApplePay via NFC and big Android-style phone sizes in 2014. Short of providing us with a one-handed phone again, the only thing left for the iPhone to give us in 2016 is enough battery to make it through the day, and as I’ve said elsewhere, the existence of the Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S is as much as a tacit admission that battery life has become a problem. On the 6/S Plus, the phone is big enough to hold a battery big enough that all day use is a done deal, and on the 4-inch phone it’s possible that the screen won’t be so big that the battery bleeds out. But that 4.7″ phone is in the sour spot, and the 6S more even than the 6.

But now that’s not going to be a problem. Because nobody does phone contracts anymore, and there’s no need to re-up the phone every 24 months just because that’s the upgrade window. Maybe you’ll want the new phone after two years, but as long as the battery was okay, you could buy an Apple Watch and give your iPhone 5S all the powers the 6S has. So I have a sneaking suspicion that the notional iPhone 7 (which history forecasts should be announced around Labor Day sometime) very well may not have anything that makes it worth replacing a viable iPhone 6.

Amazing what you can accomplish by just unlocking the device and separating phone and service.  Welcome to the 21st century, America.

Ultimately, that’s the lesson of the 21st Century. Stupid is easy. Stupid doesn’t require you to think, or question yourself, or examine your beliefs. Stupid means that you can howl and cry crocodile tears about how “we” were attacked on September 11 while turning on Washington DC as a uniform cesspool of corruption and New York City as the repository of perversion and unnatural other-ness. Stupid is what propels a reality-TV star with zero political experience and precious little to give confidence in his business acumen to the top of a major party’s field of Presidental candidates. Stupid is what lets you write off decades of mounting scientific evidence for climate change as somehow irrelevant because “liberal” or something. Stupid is how Uber can claim it’s not a car service and AirBnB can claim it’s not a rental service and Y Combinator can claim that Silicon Valley isn’t about credentials.

Stupid breaks democracy, largely because it incentivizes one side to say (in PJ O’Rourke’s legendary formulation) that government doesn’t work, get elected and prove it, and then get elected again because government doesn’t work.  Stupid breaks democracy because stupid people think they’re entitled to their own reality, and being shown something different only causes them to shove even more chips to the middle of the table. Stupid breaks democracy because people who are entitled to their own opinion decide they’re entitled to their own facts. Stupid breeds racism and sexism and bigotry because stereotypes are easier than thinking.

Stupid breaks society, because there’s nothing stupider and easier than “I got mine, fuck you.” Stupid has no problem blowing through stop signs. Stupid thinks it can beat the train across the tracks. Stupid rides its bike through a crowded pedestrian tunnel under a DISMOUNT ZONE – WALK BIKE sign and then has the temerity to take offense when yelled at. Stupid doesn’t read the instructions and complains to no end when doing what the instructions say not to do goes badly. Stupid glances through Facebook and YouTube for viral content and uses that to fill the news instead of bothering with boring stuff like reporting.  Stupid hears people comment on the need for focus at work, then puts seventy-five people in a giant open space without cube walls and runs a call center, then wonders why people keep ducking out somewhere else to try to get work done.

Stupid always privileges itself. Stupid undermines thought. Stupid goes with its gut. Stupid thinks nothing matters more than its own feelings. Stupid isn’t worried about tomorrow. Stupid knows those other people deserved it and nothing bad or undeserved would ever happen to me. Stupid believes whatever makes it feel better.

Stupid is an infinitely renewable resource. Right up until everyone dies. And if we want to live, then stupid should hurt. Lots. Stupid should bleed. Stupid needs consequences. Sometimes, those consequences need be fatal. Because they will be, for everyone, sooner or later, and better they should be for the stupid than for everyone else.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Twenty-five years ago next week is when the shooting started in Kuwait. I’ve written about that weird month before, and it stands out in my memory for more than the geopolitical situation. That was the beginning of a New Yorker subscription which has carried on uninterrupted for twenty-five years, save for the bump in the road transitioning from paper to Kindle (and now it’s a Sunday-night-in-bed thing). It was when the sports itch truly began – when I arrived at college, I was interested in Alabama football and playing Cyberball at the arcade; by the end of calendar 1991 I was all in on the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins, college basketball and the NFL in general and starting to immerse in the NBA, as I raced to backfill an enormous gap in my upbringing.

I don’t give it enough credit, but 1991 was a transformative year for me. In 1990, even through that first rough semester of undergrad, I was largely the same person I’d been my senior year: unformed, protean, trying to figure out what i would make of myself now that I was living the dream I’d had since I was five years old., and coming to grips with the fact that this college was nothing like what I’d been led to believe by television and movies and Real Genius. 1991 is when I actually did some regenerating – the wardrobe changed to all sports everything, jackets and hats and Nikes, while Sportscenter completely replaced watching the nightly news. And in the autumn, I first started to conceive of an older world, one where there was an NFL before the Super Bowl era and where big band music had been a thing, and that temporal fugue led me to Glenn Miller and joining the pep and jazz bands with a trombone I hadn’t used in five years.

I was particularly obsessed with the history of the school – I was desperately looking for old traditions, anything I could latch onto and build up the college experience I’d wanted. There were clubs in the 1920s that I wanted to revive (and for the first five years of my relationship, I was interpolating the lyrics of one of those clubs’ songs into California Drinking Song for myself until the disavowal…but that’s for later). I read the old yearbooks voraciously (including the one from 1926, which was hilarious, and the one from 1930, which was drawing parallels between the Reconstruction and the Depression) and managed to get myself let into the school archive, where I could find the gold-fringed Confederate flag that used to sit at one end of the stage. Or the handbooks they used to give to freshmen with cheers and yells (some of which were more racist than others, but Alabama in 1926 wasn’t exactly a progressive bastion on race).

I say all this because I applied twice to join something called the Student-Alumni Association. It was supposed to be – well I’m not even sure what it was supposed to be in retrospect, and it doesn’t appear on the website now, but in theory it was something to do with the history of the school and maintaining relations with alums and blah blah blah. And there was an application and a sort of cocktail party meeting which was…exactly like fraternity rush. And shocker, I didn’t make the cut either time, despite having gone to great lengths to internalize the history and “tradition” of the school.  Because the fact of the matter is, there’s only one tradition at Birmingham-Southern, and it’s having smoke blown up your ass, and if you don’t believe me ask the scholarship athletes who were there in 2006. Of which…