When I returned, I applied for a job as an assistant manager at a Pier 1, which, I assure you, would have proved much less taxing than analyzing the collected works of Baruch Spinoza. However, my lack of commitment to moving past the bottom rung of the corporate ladder at such fine institutions as Hollywood Video and Aeropostale apparently showed a lack of drive and stick-to-it-iveness that no college degree could provide.

Devoid of any real ambition (Origami Zombie notwithstanding), I decided to go back to school. Studying for the GREs were no fun, and the LSAT promised logic puzzles, so I opted for law school. Of course, there’s this hilarious down-time between applying to law school, and so I got a job working at a local sushi restaurant, waiting tables full time to pay the bills, of which I have relatively few since I live with my parents like 40 billion other college graduates who couldn’t find a job before our student loan payments were due.

While New York Law School was brave enough to accept my application, and welcome me as a member of the prestigious Class of ‘010 (the “I pulled a cardboard box of puppies from a flaming building” bit never fails in your personal statement”), I can’t say I’m not absolutely terrified of moving to what I’ve called “The City” for my entire life. Growing up in the diminutive city of Binghamton, the move to pretty decently sized Buffalo was an adjustment in and of itself. And now, for the sake of even more educatin’, I’m going to Brooklyn.

You know what I don’t like about the movie American Pie? Sex is both the source of the conflict and the resolution to that conflict.

My solution to an education that doesn’t seem to be worth anything to folks who sign paychecks? More education!

My name is Dominic, and I have got to stop going to school someday.

Addendum: http://mymarketingeffortswilldominateyourface.com: it begins.

So there’s this company called Viacom, and they’re kind of big. They own a bunch of TV channels that own a bunch of TV shows that people like to watch, and they are pissed off at Google. See, Google bought YouTube a while back, and so now the fact that YouTube is a repository for copyrighted material rubs them the wrong way: they’re all like hey guys stop that ok in lawsuit form – incidentally, the least popular of all the forms of Voltron.

You see, since Viacom owns the copyright to all their TV shows, they get to say who gets to copy them and who doesn’t. For instance, the cable company gets to broadcast last week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, and you and I don’t get to sell DVDs we downloaded from The Pirate Bay of whatever they air on MTV these days. And, well, they didn’t give pixl8 the right to copy anything to YouTube, nor to YouTube to publish anything. Technically speaking, yeah, YouTube’s “hey we can’t control what happens to those servers we own and control” argument doesn’t come off as very convincing. I mean, I know why YouTube doesn’t want to put forth the effort to erase all the copyrighted (read: popular) material from its site: $$$ – it would cost a lot, and they wouldn’t make as much afterwards.

Worth noting is the meaningless countersuit against Viacom by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who say that when Viacom sued YouTube to remove a video containing a clip of one Stephen J. Colbert, they trampled on the right of MoveOn.org (the folks who made the video in question) to “fair use” of copyright materials, specifically for the right of parody.

So here is what I don’t get: what is Viacom going to do with their copyright? Yeah, they hate the fact that Letterman shows up on the YouTube, right next to some ad that beeps and says “click here for a free ipod, playstation 3, and mustang” – and the cash money for those ads goes straight into the pockets of anyone who isn’t Viacom.

But here’s the thing: Viacom isn’t technically losing money to these pirates of the internet – they don’t offer a competing solution. If there was someplace else that was even remotely as functional and convenient as YouTube for the viewing of videos (see: NBC and ABC), I could see where Viacom was coming from, but the fact is that YouTube is doing a better job of serving Viacom’s customers than Viacom is. I mean, yeah, there’s “InnerTube” (boy that sounds like it ought to be a joke) – but it’s far from complete, just like the NBC and ABC counterparts are.

So here’s a desperate plea: if there are thousands of episodes of TV shows that you don’t have anything better to do with, make some money off them. Put them on the internet, and sell ads alongside them – hell, advertise the DVD boxed sets of the show I’m watching. I don’t care – I’ll still go to your site because I know the video quality on your site will be better than anything on YouTube, since they have to conserve bandwidth, server space, and processing power (in the flash video compression process), none of which you’re short on. For god’s sake, stop pretending YouTube is robbing you of anything – it’s serving your customers better than you are, and for that, they definitely deserve to profit.

That’s my computer running on Beryl, window managing software that runs on Linux-based operating system. Mine uses Ubuntu, because it’s pretty accessible for people that lack the mental fortitude to wrap their head around things like command lines and compiling software. Like me, for instance.

Back to the video: Beryl is derived from a similar desktop system called Compiz, and now many users of each seem to hate the other, but the fussin’ and the feudin’ seems to have died down as of late.

So whereas most desktops are two dimensional like your monitor, Beryl is all about the third dimension: you get that nifty cube view where you can see extra desktop spaces, and when you’re on a specific desktop, the windows get nifty little effects like wobbling when they’re moved, bursting into flames when they’re closed, and doing the “Star Trek” beam-out thing when they’re minimized. The best part is that you can pick which effects you want to use – it comes with ten, and you can install more. They’ve got a whole page talking about all the nifty junk that Beryl does.

In conclusion, I like shiny things.

But there’s been a lot of jibber jabber, so to speak, about the state of MP3 players and the purchasing of music therein lately. You see, many many moons ago, CDs were expensive and had maybe one or two songs that you actually wanted to listen to. Despite the fact that mass produced music by mass produced musicians was a safer investment than ever before, things were bleak for folks who liked music.

Then there was this Napster thing. You could steal all the music you wanted to – individual songs or a whole discography. It was simple, it was convenient, and it had just about every song you could think of. Oh, and there was that whole “hey kids, it’s totally free” thing that appealed to a lot of folks. Of course, it was sued off the face of the planet for stealing money from Madonna or something, and so people switched to things that were essentially the same as Napster, like Kazaa, Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, Gnutella, EDonkey, and so on and so forth and blah blah blah copyright infringement is unbelievably effortless in a digital medium.

So some folks set up online music stores of varying degrees of usefulness. People that were stealing music for free laughed at the notion that anyone would pay for music on the internet, but after the record industry started suing people, the stores got a lot more popular. See? Those damned kids can be reasoned with: all it takes is the threat of a million-dollar lawsuit. (Mom, Dad, are you listening?)

Of course, the music sold in those stores is, by request of a music industry terrified of relapsing to the days of Napster, digitally locked up (using technology collectively called DRM) to make copying it more difficult; but if you can play a file, you can copy a file – nothing’s perfectly secured. But let’s move on working under the assumption that these files are more or less immune to illegal copying.

Steve Jobs runs Apple (and boy, does he do a good job) – they own the iTunes Music Store, and a while back, he wrote this letter asking the record companies to sell unsecured music on the internet, kind of like how they already sell unsecured music in the mall on CDs. He notes that less than 3% of the music on an average iPod (and believe me, he has the means to check) is in the form of those electronically locked (and verifiably legally purchased) songs. He thinks that in the face of such statistics, it’s only logical to sell unlocked music in both the internet and the malls.

A few weeks after Jobs’s letter, the record industry convened and complained about Steve Jobs and his “stranglehold on the digital music industry.” Their view is that locking up digital music is necessary, and Jobs doesn’t actually intend to unlock it. Rather, what Jobs ought to do is let everyone use his company’s digital locking scheme, something which Jobs claims would compromise its worth. Sort of like how Coke only lets a few guys know the recipe for Coca Cola – it’s not exactly a bad idea.

And now the tiny medieval country of Europe has joined the bandwagon – they have laws regarding the interoperability of software and hardware, and they say that the fact that songs that you buy from iTunes only work on an iPod is unfair. Granted, they’re only about 3% of the songs on your average, and they’ll play on your computer, but the Europeans are pretty adamant.

So it seems that the record companies will get their way, and the DRM that Apple uses for songs bought on iTunes will have to be made interoperable with other media players. Jobs would prefer unlocked files, consumers would prefer unlocked files, and Europe would be satisfied with unlocked files, but the record companies are unlikely to not treat prospective customers like thieves. Here’s hoping that it gets broken like Jobs claims it would, and the record companies see that the solution here is simplicity rather than more digital locks.

No, really, they don’t. Yeah, there are a lot of Jewish folks in certain professions, and yeah, they do control at least eight or nine continents. But let’s be honest: their influence is largely tempered by several important factors, including but not limited to bears, bees, and ninjas made out of pork. In practice, they probably control no more of the world than your average enclave of reverse vampires.

But that’s not the point. The point is Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy – just ask members of the Georgia and Texas state legislatures, who were circulating a memo to that effect. According to the AP, the reverse vampires’ patsy man responsible for all this Scapejewing is none other than one Marshall Hall, founder of the sensibly-titled “Fair Education Foundation.” What this foundation advocates, on their page titled “The Earth is Not Moving,” would be hilarious satire, if only it were satire. Let’s make a list of what they believe:

• Your standard “6,000 year old Earth” stuff
• The Earth neither rotates on an axis nor revolves about the sun
• Occult-math is what perpetuates lies such as the size, age, and general makeup of the universe
• Copernicus’s heliocentric model is baseless, factless, and generally a big fat lie which every single scientist for the last goodness-knows-how-long has deliberately perpetuated

I mean, I don’t mean to hate on this fellow’s religion. All the religions have some kooky leftovers from The Good Old Days when people worked hard, lived fast, and died of old age at 23 a lot. Hell, for a while, folks thought Pi was 3. But, man, don’t go trying to push your religion on other people in public schools, especially by asking politicians to consider your “Fair Education Foundation” when it comes time to put down cash moneys for the classroom. We have rules about that, pops.

And before you even go there, no, science is not a religion. Science doesn’t really concern itself with things like prescriptive ethics – I’m sure the guys in the lab coats are happy to leave that stuff to you guys. In return, you agree that living a good life is doable without arguing about the flatitude or velocitation of the planet; essentially, that being a good person and doing unto others in one fashion or another is more essential to the practice of a religion than whether the universe was created in a blinding flash of light six thousand or fifteen billion years ago. Really, aren’t those the important parts?

No, no they are not. Let the debate continue ad nauseam!

Those ungodly peddlers of debauchery at the Cartoon Network, of course. Who else?

You see, in an attempt to either terrorize America or advertise a movie, Cartoon Network hired some hip youngsters to plant bombs in major cities around our fair country. The jury is quite literally out on which to go with, as the charges against them have yet to make it to trial. The charges, according to le wiquepedie, stem from this law against placing a “hoax device” with “intent to cause panic.” Well, I can solve this case pretty quickly: if they put up devices that are made to resemble bombs, which would (understandably) cause panic, it’s pretty open and shut. So what did they put up around fair old Boston?

Oh. You see, that’s not exactly what I’d call a bomb. Maybe when it’s not lit up like a sort of Lite Brite that would cause your Aunt Rosa to cross herself and down another martini, it looks more threatening. Of course, it still doesn’t look like much of a bomb. In fact, I’ve tried with the world’s foremost Lite Brite simulator, and I can’t make anything that looks like a bomb, either. Unless….

Okay, but even that doesn’t look like a bomb. I mean, really, Bostonians, shouldn’t you be more worried about about your city killing you? The way I see it, being killed by incompetently assembled public works is more pressing a concern for a city that hasn’t seen an act of bona fide terrorism since 1773. I don’t know – this whole thing screams “hey, look how terrified the terrorists have made us!” Would you guys like to cry ‘terrorism’ when you see an unattended backpack on a bus? Don’t you think this sort of stupidity emboldens the terrorists?

I mean, I sure don’t know. I’ve never even seen a terrorist, let alone discussed how bold he feels after various events. But it did get the head of Cartoon Network to resign his post. You know, on account of how some idiots in Boston can’t distinguish between “blinking light designed to draw attention” and “bomb designed to blend into surroundings.” Actually we’ve been through this before. Last April, Ohio was in fear of some of those question mark boxes from Mario (as seen here)wrapped in holographic gold foil and hung from trees. You see, terrorists would want their bombs to be inconspicuous – unless they were hanging from holographic gold trees, we can probably dismiss them as harmless. Also, a sticker on a bike said “this bike is a pipe bomb” – once again, unless we’re dealing with surrealist terrorists, I’m going to recommend we all relax and not panic.

In conclusion, Boston, don’t be so neurotic. If the terrorists do plant bombs in your fair city, they will probably not blink in neon tones. But hey, thanks again for making the rest of us seem terrified by association.

The fundamental idea here is that folks don’t like to bother themselves with search engines, so they just type generic terms into their address bar and hit enter. This is called “direct navigation,” and it’s a pretty good business for a few people. Obviously, there are only so many words people are randomly going to hunt for – giganticcheesewheels.com isn’t going to have many visitors. Perfume.com is going to be much more popular. Bighugeperfumewarehouse.com is not quite popular. You can probably see how this is a pretty tiny field, and why the address of your site isn’t nearly as important as what goods or services you can offer. (Exhibit A)

But the guys who make a lot of money doing it do make more money than many entire sports teams. If you were the first on your block to realize that owning a single domain like perfume.com was a novelty, but owning thousands upon thousands was a livelihood, then bully for you. And when that market dried up, people moved on to typos of the popular ones: prfume.com, and canoos.com and so on and so forth. There are more ways to misspell words than there are words to register as web addresses, but ten different people might misspell a word ten different ways – ultimately, this is still a market for only a handful of people to profit from.

I find the practice humorous: I use search engines, as do (by my numbers) roughly 7,200% of all internet users. As a well-educated geek, I recognize that I am, by most accounts, an aberration in many senses of the word; yet I can’t imagine that this is a particularly awesome business model. For one, you don’t actually sell anything – you have zero content, and your only service is to act as a directory to the highest bidder. Just because Chucksbigcanoeclearance.com paid the most to be the #1 ad on canoes.com doesn’t mean his store is what I’m looking for. Hell, in my experience, his site is every bit as likely to be a cornucopia of ads as canoes.com was.

And secondly… well, there is no secondly. Direct-navigation, hoping people never ever learn how to search for information on the internet so much as blunder into it, well, it’s not particularly sustainable as people become increasingly internet-savvy; more and more people every year are going to head to search engines for their searches, instead of canoes.com, as they realize search engines are meritocracies that rank web sites by usefulness and popularity as opposed to the “highest bidder” system of direct-navigation sites.

And now, Richard Rosenblatt, the guy who ran MySpace.com for a time, says there is a better way. He has a vision that involves the venture-capital magnet buzzword Web 2.0. You see, he notes that web sites like Blogger, Flickr, and YouTuber don’t actually create any content: people go there because other people make those sites worth visiting by adding self serving essays, photos, and clips from Family Guy, respectively.

And now, a word from Monotony Puppy.

So what does any of this have to do with the portal of nothing but ads that is canoes.com? Well, good old Dick wants to make these domains more functional to increase their appeal, by giving users the chance to add their own content, just like all those cool sites in the last paragraph. Can you imagine? No more going to perfume.com and being disappointed that it’s nothing but ads: now you get there and type in what you know about perfume, and later go to sites about perfume that were recommended by other people. In fact, he says he’s got a prototype set up in eHow.com, a site where the users write the useless articles about topics like how to french kiss and how to unjam your sleeping bag’s zipper. I can practically see the cash rolling in.

Dick, Dick, Dick. Firstly, the internet has a place to go for information that may or may not be useful: it’s called the goddamned Wikipedia. That one is hardly holding together as it stands today, and that’s with more than three million registered users, and countless random folks wandering by and fixing typos or replacing the article on California’s State Supreme Court with “dave wuz here” or something equally inane. The point is, you’ll never get that many folks to canoes.com; and that’s only the second biggest thing Wikipedia has going for it.

The biggest? Centralization. I can’t pull up a list of all the perfume, canoe, and cheese-related “direct-navigation” sites that I might like to pick and choose which ones to weigh in on. With Wikipedia, I sure can: it has a search feature that can let me pull up untold pages of stuff I forgot I knew all about. You’re literally hoping that somewhere, someone stumbles upon your dynamic, user-driven clusterfuck and excretes some insight onto it.

And the bad news gets worse for Dick: you see, the thing about user-generated content is that machines can write it a lot faster than you or I can. And what do they write with such superhuman alacrity? So-called comment spam on blogs and message boards and anywhere else you hope people will show up to generate content. I quote myself:

…when anyone’s allowed to say anything they want, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it’s going to be abused. Every comment form on the internet is filled to the brim with ads for online casinos, dick enlarging/hardening/whatevering pills, et cetera.

So what have you gotten out of your move from direct-navigation ad farms at the service of the highest bidder, all with little to no useful content? Why, direct-navigation ad farms with ads generated by robots at the service of the highest bidder, all containing little to no useful content. Golly, Dick. What a goddamn visionary you are.

To go for the bland open-mic night humor, turn to joke 1.
To go for the zany open-mic night humor, turn to joke 2.

1. While the relationship between my essay’s title and Bert’s title might be a bit obtuse if you’re inbred, if you look really hard, you may see the reference.
2. Bertrand Russell is perhaps most famous for being the only person in history named “Bertrand.”

The point is that there are a lot of reasons why I’m not a platypus. For instance, I don’t have a venom spur on either of my hind legs. Nor do I really have hind legs to speak of, being bipedal and all. Also, I lack a beak and the capacity to lay eggs.

But perhaps the most important difference between myself and a duck-billed platypus is that yesterday, I was staring in rapt attention at this very screen at this very page as Steve Jobs announced he had in fact, scaled Mount Sinai and received the most important thing to come from the Big Guy Upstairs since mana and nectar back in that Eden thing. But what could be better than citric acid-laden soda, or tortilla chips coated in cheese dust?

The Steve has given unto us the iPhone. It’s a phone, an ipod, and a PDA all in one. It is the second coming of Newton Christ, and the unbelievers shall pay some horrible price as described in either the Bible, or the owner’s manual of a 1993 Chevrolet Lumina.

The point is that the iPhone is unbelievably sleek. Firstly, it’s an iPod with nifty graphics heretofore only seen on iTunes, and an even bigger screen for the watching of important videos. Second, it’s a phone with WiFi, Bluetooth, a 2 megapixel camera, and just about the sleekest interface your eyes ever did see. The interface is due in part to the iPhone running OS X, meaning desktop-quality programs run on the phone (like web browsers and email clients), and goodies like widgets. The whole thing comes together in a package that leaves geeks feeling weak at the knees. Even lay people seem to be fascinated by this strange device from beyond the stars.

So, to recap:

1. I am not a platypus.
2. Apple makes obscenely cool products.
3. I want us all to be clear that I am not a platypus.

While most prospective cures for diabetes operate under the assumption that Diabetes is an autoimmune disease (the body attacking its own insulin production mechanisms), these Canadian fellows proposed that diabetes is instead a disease caused by the nervous system. Their hypothesis centered on the nerve endings in the pancreas being perpetually inflamed, leading to the cessation of insulin production. And you know no one would write about it if it didn’t work. Because it did: dramatically. The diabetic mice injected with capsaicin were cured overnight, and human trials are set to begin shortly.

It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of something like this: the article says the treatment could relieve patients of diabetes symptoms for years at a time. And yet, at the same time, it’s overshadowed by something I read in my advertisement-ridden hometown newspaper. Something that deals with a problem far nearer and even dearer to the collective hearts of Americans.

Pet Obesity. It’s an epidemic, and in a recent poll conducted by Gallup, Reuters, and Yale University, the average American ranks pet obesity as a higher concern than terrorism, the economy, or religious freedom. It’s true. Well, forget all that diabetes crap. I’m sure nobody actually cares about finding a cure for that anyways.

Fortunately, there is hope. No, you don’t have to go through the tedium and soul-crushing labor of feeding your dog less. Nor would anyone have the insufferable gall to ask you to walk your dog. I don’t think anyone would enjoy that. But finally, someone has freed you from the tyranny of taking care of your pet.

Stuff that furry little bastard full of the new doggy diet pill. Yes, that’s right. Now your dog can join in on the “drugs are bad except the ones sold by companies” craze sweeping the nation. Coming soon, a treatment for Restless Tail Syndrome! A medication for Doggy Depression! A pill to cure Doggy Balding!

That’s it. I’m moving to Canada.

However, today I come to the internet(s) for the purpose of attempting to augur the future, fail though the mighty Yoda himself did. For although his proficiency and skill points were distributed wisely, he lacks one component entirely critical to the seeing of the future: peyote science.

Yes, I have constructed a machine, its awesomeness rivaled only by the terror it inspires in small children and men of the cloth. (And, in retrospect, perhaps also the terror inspired in small children by men of the cloth.) This machine has revealed unto me secrets no man should behold. For instance, it is scientific fact that:

• Al Gore’s new movie “An Inconvenient Truth 2: This Time It’s Warmer” will gross between seven and eight zillion dollars.
• Several of the wealthiest kings of Europe will band together in order to prohibit the use of vowels on the sabbath.
• Japan will finally succeed in its thousand-year quest to carve Bart Simpson’s face on the planet Mars with a very long stick.
• The greatly feared Robot Revolution will finally manifest itself as robots everywhere demand health benefits and sick leave.
• The band Japan will finally succeed in destroying the country Japan, preserving Mars for generations to come.
• The death of Balder, which sets into motion a chain of events culminating in:
• Ragnarok.
• In perhaps the greatest act of showmanship ever conceived by mortals, a team of Shaolin Monks will beat Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past without the pegasus shoes.
• I successfully re-enact the Battle of Actium using sea otters in a variety of adorable costumes.
• Saddam Hussein’s corpse is reanimated by a panoply of arcane and terrible necromancies and forced to perform showtunes for all eternity.
• Finally, on December 31, 2007, Regina Spektor shows up at my front door when her tour bus breaks down on my street. Though initially believing it to be my lucky day, I soon realize that she’s been sent by the KGB to kill me in a hilarious case of mistaken identity and international intrigue.