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Posted by:But what a story it would've been if she had swallowed a golf ball, hm? Or perhaps, in true journalistic fashion, the better story might have been if she was swallowed by a golf ball. We shall never know, as it stands as a point of reason in the screaming chaos of the world that our artist did not swallow a golf ball. Nor has she, to my knowledge, been in any sort of recent proximity to a golf ball not of the Wii Sports ilk...and those, I am given to understand, are particularly difficult to swallow.
I really dig the way this strip turned out. Visually, literarily...everything about it seems to work really well, to my eye. And I'm glad that Kent has finally come up with, while not a solution, a way of fending off the demons for at least a little while. Every once in a while he manages to bust out something classy like that, and I have to admire him for it.
I would like to talk about the iPad a little bit, seeing as it has been unveiled recently. In all honesty, I don't really give a damn about it. Which isn't a good way to start off talking about something, so I decided to do some perfunctory research--Google is my friend, as is Apple's website. And after what I've seen in the past five minutes, I'm even less impressed than I was when I started out. I mean, take a look at the thing. You know what that looks like? Something I goddamn own already. It's called an iPod Touch. Only the iPod is not the approximate size of a sheet of notebook paper, so I can hook it on to my belt instead of jamming it into one more piece of luggage I have to carry. Never once have a thought to myself re: my iPod Touch, "You know what would make this better? If it was fucking bigger." Not to say that particular thought hasn't crossed my mind before. It has. But usually in regard to bacon sandwiches. It has simply never been associated with my iPod, which is (so far as I'm concerned) perfectly sized for my purposes. Basically what Apple is now trying to sell people is the iPod Touch writ large, which (for individuals with no sense of self-control or with a crushing awareness of their own minute genitalia) actually seems like an upgrade...despite being more expensive, more cumbersome, and--as a consequence--less useful.
The entire concept is intellectually bankrupt. Note that I don't usually extend much ire towards Apple in general--I grew up on Apple computers, found Windows machines to be aberrations in the eyes of God, and then discovered the Tao of Ubuntu, pretty much in that order. Apple makes clean, functional machines that are good for folks who just plain need to get shit done and don't have time to mess with all the fiddly bits that Windows has hanging out all over the place. But couldn't they have spent more time developing something...new? Like, say, a video game console? I bet an Apple-constructed video game console would kick ass. Their only real competition would be Nintendo, and together they could practically leave Sony and Microsoft in the dust. And they've been building hardware for years, something that is a relatively recent development for Microsoft, which means that creating an attractive, potent platform would be perfectly within their capabilities.
At the least, couldn't they have stuck a keyboard on the iPad and just made it a tablet PC that happened to have a touch screen? That would even be useful. Seriously. Have they even done that yet? I don't know. I don't keep up with these things. Is a goddamn honest-to-Christ keyboard just too much to ask from these people anymore?
Sometimes I wonder.
-James
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