Are my eyes really blue?

Tonight I caved and bought a six-pack of Coca-Cola Life. What is Coca-Cola Life, you ask? As far as I can tell, it’s a transparent attempt to get Coke product into Whole Foods. Do the checklist: HFCS replaced with cane sugar? Check. Aspartame and ace-K and sucralose replaced with stevia extract? Check. Glass bottles instead of PET plastic or aluminum? Check. 8 ounce containers with green labels? Check. There’s nothing in here that couldn’t go on the shelf at Whole Paycheck, and that is as significant a development as the revelation that Diet Coke with Splenda only existed because Wal-Mart wanted a Splenda-based diet soda to market.

So…the great shift to organic purity has finally hit the biggest soft drink in the world. How does it TASTE though?

To be honest? It’s a little strange. The mouthfeel is almost hollowed-out, sort of: this is a blend of sugar and stevia and the actual sugar content is reduced by more than a third from standard Coke (and slightly more relative to the glass-bottle Mexican Coke that is indispensable to life in California). In a way, it’s a recreation of C2, the abortive reduced-calorie offering from a decade ago, which used HFCS and various diet blends to halve the caloric contents while still maintaining more or less the classic Coke taste.

I took the liberty of testing it out on the wife, who is genetically sensitive to bitter flavors and as a result eschews all artificial sweeteners. She could still taste the stevia bitterness, but much diminished, and allowed that given the option she would take this over Diet Coke or Coke Zero. So that’s a step in the right direction. I’d be happy to keep it around myself, just because an 8 ounce shot is a lot closer to the classic 6.5 ounce “nickel Coke” of the 20th century. Even if this one costs closer to a dollar than a nickel. Portion control is easy when they do it for you for a fee.

It’s going to be an interesting experiment. Can the Coca-Cola corporation move their flagship beverage in a healthier direction? Will the market force them to? Will anyone but annoying affluent white people glom onto this? Is there an audience beyond people like myself who are just a bitch for any form of soda marketing? Ask me later, I’m finishing this six-pack.

Tennessee gets sent to the Gator Bowl. With a record of 3-5 in conference and 6-6 overall, they are at best the 10th of 12 bowl-eligible teams. And yet, they’re off to the same bowl that snubbed Vanderbilt last year when they went 4-4 in conference and 8-4 overall. We sank to the bowl in Birmingham, which now winds up with a 6-5 Florida team that didn’t even reschedule a non-conference game washed out by weather.

Nothing in the SEC – not your performance on the field, not your performance in the classroom, not your ability to stay out of legal trouble, not the quality of your performance in any other sport – matters as much as how good you were at football in the 1970s. That’s how we can go 8-4 in back to back years and play one bowl four miles from home and another in Birmingham while that school to the East can go 6-6, get bowl eligible for the first time in four seasons, and vault to a bowl four spots above where its standings would suggest.

I don’t know where else we could go. I think the inherent nature of the playoff system and the burgeoning of 12 and 14-team conferences means that nowhere else can be that much better. I certainly don’t much care for the prospect of being the 14th team in the ACC or the B1G. Ideally, I’d love to see the world set back as it was in 1990 for college football purposes – no bullshit about conference title games (we’ve had a playoff since 1992, if we’re honest about it), no automatic tie-ins below conference winners, and nothing but a mythical national title at the end, rather than some half-assed combination of polls and computers and committees to do the same thing with a veneer of scientific respectability around it.

Fuck it. More than ever I’m thinking the Ivy League might have been the place for me: no postseason at all, no football scholarships, just ten games to line up and sic ’em and to hell with what anyone else wants to do. There’s the dream, and if it means an end to the SEC run for Vanderbilt, so be it. Georgia Tech certainly hasn’t suffered by departing.

Not much to say here, except that if you find this outcome surprising or shocking at all, you haven’t been paying attention. Make the police a militarized occupying force, decide that all brown people are A Criminal and all criminals are Magneto, and you end up with a bunch of dumb necks who want to need the guns seizing the opportunity.

We could be the greatest country in the world, but rednecks.

Last night, I took the Moto X out for the first time since getting the new phone. I was immediately struck by how it’s gone from being the bigger phone to the smaller phone; despite having a physical screen of the same size, the iPhone 6 brings a slightly higher resolution and the Moto X is shorter and ever so slightly narrower (in no small part due to the smaller bezels that go along with foregoing the TouchID button and the fixation on symmetry). With the leather case, the thickness is similar, and remarkably the Moto has the larger battery (and a more ergonomic curve in the hand).

It’s entirely possible that the Moto will have improved battery life under Lollipop. i certainly hope so, as it’s going to be the travel-abroad phone next year. In all other respects, though, the iPhone 6 on AT&T is a clear winner: the coverage is superior and the data throughput faster almost without exception. And the day-to-day battery life is far more acceptable; I can hit it as hard as I normally would at work, without worrying about it, and still have about half the battery left by quitting time even if I haven’t plugged in.

It was the right move. I’m glad I was able to hold out, even if it took for damn near ever to get it.

I suppose I should say something about the elections.  It’s incredibly frustrating, to be honest: Mitch McConnell vows to go scorched earth, fight everything, make Obama a one-term president, and then six years later gets a majority in Congress because people are fed up with the obstruction and check out.  Which is really the secret, because the low turnout is what put the GOP over the top (in addition to the disproportionate vulnerability of Democrats defending seats won int he 2008 Obama victory).  The Democrats have to figure out how to make people turn out in the off years and not cede the field to the aging racists on their Medicare scooters forwarding scare mail about immigrants to everyone in sight.

I can pretty much guarantee you that there will be at least one shutdown attempt and one impeachment attempt in the next two years.  They’ll find some excuse.  Forget everything you hear about the “moderate Republicans” or the “grownups” – there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the GOP and the Tea Party, there never was, and the successful laundering of the Republican label in the wake of 2008 while going even further to the right is one of the amazing mysteries of our time.  Ted Cruz is driving this bus, folks, and he sees the 45th President every time he looks in the mirror.  And don’t underestimate the chance of Clinton Fatigue dragging Hillary down to the point where he – or another of his neb-confederate pals in Amen Corner – finds himself in the Oval Office on January 20, 2017.

Better days are coming.  They can’t live forever.  The only catch is, can we last long enough to ride it out.

It’s happening.  The shuttle drivers at Loop Transportation, the shuttle bus company used by Facebook, have voted to unionize under the auspices of the Teamsters (historically appropriate, actually) and will now bargain collectively.  This is being trumpeted as a watershed moment in Silicon Valley – although most people seem to be regarding it as the invasion of old-school backward-thinking legacy business infecting the land of disruption and innovation.

Horseshit.

The union is the natural response to what is blithely called “the 1099 economy.” When everyone below director level is a contractor – especially a completely independent contractor – companies are free from the burden of treating their employees like, well, employees.  You can just “sever your relationship” if you want to get rid of them.  Benefits and health care are their own business, not yours.   The technology industry has managed to create a world where the smartphone-enabled equivalent of picking up guys from the Home Depot parking lot is a preferred business model for the likes of Handy or Taskrabbit or half a dozen “transportation network companies”.

This is exactly what unions formed to prevent.  You can’t just randomly donk off employees for the sake of saving money, or because you don’t want to be responsible for their actions, or say ‘this is the job and you have six hours of unpaid downtime in between, take it or leave it.”  The role of the union is to shift the balance of power so the regular workers have a say.  And in that mythical 1950s Pleasantville that the Republicans constantly talk about wanting us to return to?  Unions represented one out of three American workers.

It’s going to be a useful reality check.  Nothing like a picket line and a giant inflatable rat to make people realize that oops, there are human beings on the other side of the screen, and they’re more than just the $40,000-a-year Morlocks that turn the gears so your cloud-cuckoo-land can carry on.  These are the real human beings in Northern California who were here long before you dropped out of Stanford and they count just as much, because your Ayn Rand paradise here in Galt’s Gulch on Market will go to shit once there’s nobody actually driving the shuttles or catering the burrito bar or cleaning up the gym or restocking the snack harbor. 

And for me, it’s a little bit of the East Coast to cheer me up. The people’s flag is deepest red, motherfuckers.  (Not Cardinal red.  Fuck those guys.)

First things first: switching from the cheap case I bought in advance (which was apparently spec’d out from pre-production info and doesn’t actually fit the buttons right) to the Apple leather case made all the ergonomic difference in the world. Black leather wrapped tight to the phone lends it a premium feel and a lot more comfort in the hand, and it grips well without sticking in the pocket. Approved and worth the money.

Battery life seems to be settling too. It looks good for about 8 hours of real-world use consisting mostly of Twitter, taking and posting pictures, checking mail and reading RSS. No audio playback; this was all screen on and cellular data with no Wi-Fi to speak of, and in a crowded environment. (yes, back at Disneyland again. You got a better torture test for a phone?) And while using an iPad charger is still the fastest, I could throw it on a lipstick charger at dinner and go from under 30 to 94% battery between cocktails and taking the entree plates.

Performance in areas of 4G-non-LTE coverage has, of course, kicked the shit out of EV-DO. I was routinely pulling around 6 Mbps without LTE, which is well over double the theoretical max of Verizon’s non-LTE data speed, which I never reached on the iPhone 5. And good coverage means good battery. Even with the bigger screen, I still outperform the 5. I’m curious how it will go at work.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that I can run voice dictation and get results at least as accurate as something like SwiftKey or Swype. The one finger swishing around the keyboard may not be efficacious, but if you can just tell the phone what to type and get the same or better results, that’s huge. Especially since you now get typing as you talk rather than waiting for it to be piped back for processing. Careful word choice means I can text the wife almost without typographical error purely via Siri. And that ain’t hay. It is in fact a major computing breakthrough, one I started watching for two decades ago as I tried to persuade a Power Mac 6100 to accept the rudimentary voice commands built into System 7.1.2 (in a gravelly Southern accent, natch).

Things I still need to test: battery life on a normal workday. The viability of reading on this rather than a Kindle or AMOLED phone screen. The impact of streaming WatchESPN during basketball season and how badly it kills the power. And once the Moto X (2013) gets Android Lollipop, there’s going to be an all-day utility bake off.

But for now, it looks like this phone (with a small charger in reserve for known full days) might just be ready to go as the One Full Time Device. And not a moment too soon either.

Two months. That’s how long it took for the iPhone 6 I ordered through work to show up. Well, better late than never, and in keeping with tradition, this is banged out on the device itself.

It’s too damn big. In every particular, it conveys SIZE like a Texas pickup with horns in the hood. I know intellectually it’s thinner than the Moto X, but it’s definitely taller and I suspect wider, with a top bevel that really doesn’t need to be that size. 

The keyboard is larger, of course, which alleviates a few of the issues with the iPhone 5 running iOS 8. Haven’t had time to see if the autocorrect runs away with it. 

Battery life is impossible to judge on first run: it’s all syncs and downloads and various screwing around. In a couple of days we’ll know more once I’m back to a standard load out. But this bigger screen means more battery used and I’m not persuaded the bigger battery will make the tradeoff work. Definitely better signal at work, though, and better fallbacks when LTE isn’t offered. That might help. (thanks, AT&T.) And the screen isn’t on for podcast playback, which will hopefully be less of a percentage hit. 

But the size of the damn thing…I’m going to need the slimmest practical case and hope it can stand up to the front pocket, in which it already feels like a slab. This is a purse phone. That’s not a compliment. 

Tim Cook finally unveils the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley, in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek.  To be honest, it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal.  This has to be one of the most gay-friendly places on Earth, and the man whose intensity is the stuff of legend never gave the impression that his orientation was relevant – because who can picture him having time for any kind of relationship other than the Auburn Tigers?  But he said it, and sounded much like Anderson Cooper when he did: everyone knows, everyone’s known, it’s not a big deal, but I need to say it for the sake of other people who might need the help or the inspiration or the comfort of knowing it’s not just me.

And that’s not nothing.  In fact, that’s huge, in perspective.  Because the worst thing you can be growing up in exurban Alabama is different.  Gay, black, foreign, or just smart – if you have anything that keeps you from being just like everybody else, you’re going to be on the outside looking in.  The closest thing I ever had to being a minority was that four-year undergrad stint where I wasn’t in a fraternity, and it drove home the point that as a minority, it’s not the active prejudice that does for you as much as the ignorance of your existence. The assumption that difference doesn’t exist – it’s that third Goventa level of power, the dismissal of anything that the dominant power doesn’t wish to acknowledge.

Well, this is going to be hard to dodge.  Possibly the richest, most powerful living Alabamian – and Auburn alum – is gay, and doesn’t care if you know, and thinks his home state should work harder on not being assholes to gay people.  The cognitive dissonance alone might be enough to power the state for a year or two.  (Although it REALLY makes you wonder what would happen if Nick Saban delivered and supported an openly gay Heisman-caliber quarterback who came through with a national title.)

Good for Tim.  He didn’t have to, but he knows the meaning of non nobis solum. And if some kid in Alabama feels less alone and more empowered – or if somebody in the old country rethinks their beliefs as a result – he’s done more than any amount of boosting AAPL stock.

Comes now the news that the woman behind the popular and acclaimed “Tropes vs Women” video series has been forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University. Anita Sarkeesian received rather extensive death threats, and police said they couldn’t screen for firearms at the event because of Utah open-carry laws.

Setting aside the extent to which the Beehive State chooses to coddle ammosexuals and gunsuckers at the expense of public safety, this is basically a capitulation to terrorism. Some limpdick in a basement made threats to shut down something he found objectionable. That’s terrorism. Full stop. And it all came about because apparently somebody is terrified that a model of masculinity built on homophobic insults in Call of Duty groupchat and 4chan boards might not stand up to modern standards of, you know, mature society.

And really, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Arrested adolescence in a bunch of boys who never evolved past the He Man Woman Haters Club in the basement. Guys who are actively resisting the need to grow up to get along in the modern world. In its way, it’s of a piece with the rest of the Peter Pan syndrome that afflicts way too much of modern society and which I’ve spent plenty of space here decrying. And this is why.

Because you have to grow up. You can’t live your entire life stuck at 14. That’s called Lord of the Flies and that tends to be the usual result when you leave a bunch of spotty student boys to their own devices. And for the pubescent-minded scum that are flogging this movement in the name of fighting off adulthood, I’m sure that’s the dream.

But it’s 2014. And society is for grown-ups, regardless of age. You can be a grownup at 12 or you can stave it off your entire life. But it’s long past time for our society to stop indulging people who won’t grow up.