|
sticky-feet-beerness
continued from last week...
At any rate.
He lumbered his way over to me, and I couldn't help but cringe a little bit, knowing that odds were he was going to speak, and the closer he got the louder it was bound to be.
While this was an effective technique (if you can call something that appears to be non-intentional a technique) at getting him noticed, all further investigation into this man stopped, in the interest of not being subjected to his voice for extended periods of time.
Unfortunately, I had been tasked, a little while ago, of investigating some very interesting claims Rasselas was making about a year or two ago.
It was in the backwash of the Internet bust, when everyone was in on the game and the whole boatload of too young developers, hoards of project managers, and CEOs with more charisma than you could shake a stick at all hopped on and sank the whole boat right down to Davy Jones' Digital Locker.
I had just finished up my almost obligatory stint as Chief Technical Officer of a company that promised a new sort of application hosting service that tanked after a quarter's worth of business, and I had taken my lofty title and my last month's missing paycheck and offered my services reporting for a prestigious Internet-only magazine.
And I cracked the story that shook the world.
Well, shook the world in the sense that every other prestigious Internet magazine took up the story, whether or not the only research they did on the story was a quick skim of my own article (and oftentimes not the whole body of it, just the adverts or something), most 'blog sites wrote some opinion piece on it, and it even trickled into the mainstream press in the little easily digestible boxes of content which were generally scattered through most magazines' pages that were increasingly the only content anyone ever read in the dead-tree version of magazines, anyway. Or at least the only portion of the magazines that people were able to store in memory once they'd put the thing down and were, say, chatting around the watercooler. The watercooler that had been a fully-stocked coffee bar with Espressochino, Espressochoc, and numerous other caffeine or caffeine-like-based drinks. It was just back to a watercooler after a particularly hard-hitting cost-cutting exercise.
Well, information fed information, and soon I was probably mostly forgotten as the source, and it was everywhere.
Rasselas Hildenbrand, an oddball inventor living out in the suburbs of America, claimed to have invented something that was going to change the very course of human history.
As you may know (and it's hard to imagine anyone not knowing after the near saturation of the various channels of info gathering), several different ideas popped up as to what this history-changing thing could be. The personal bastions of news, the weblogs, were taking their leads from the established (though not much more) online media outlets. It didn't really matter. Hell, I didn't know what it was. I got an email one day from Rasselas, who had gotten my name through a common colleague of a colleague, telling me he had something to share with the world, and he wanted to grant me an interview. Seeing as none of my other old contacts -- mostly old co-workers, enjoying a different line of work these days than anything tech-related -- had proved to be a very interesting interview, I figured I'd go for the scientist/new invention angle, rather than the bookshop attendant vis-à-vis coding in Java all day. The thing is, he wouldn't tell me what is was. Myself, a CEO of a big web-based email service, an anit-Virus czar (it was on his business card, anyway), and the President of a Fortune 500 company were allowed up to his house/workspace, where he gave us a demo of a video game he was playing at the moment (Unreal Tournament), his cats, and a quick speech about just how profoundly life-changing this invention was going to be. Sadly, he didn't have any production models to show us. I managed to make an article out of it, anyway.
There were the device-mongers, convinced it was some new personal device that they could carry around and it would do one of the following: organise their lives, remember phone numbers, dates, addresses for them, ensure personal security.
There were the vehicular-inclined, who were a lot like the device-mongers, only they thought it was something bigger, meant to be ridden, and ranged from new scooters to personal flying machines to hybrid fuel autos to skateboards like the ones Michael J. Fox rode in Back to the Future.
There were the standards/software-guys, thinking it might be a new protocol or yet one more killer app or something, and had dug up something that I'd missed on Rasselas tinkering with Ted Nelson's Xanadu software back in the day. Turns out that wasn't Rasselas but some engineer who happened to have a mustache and be wearing a hunting cap.
There were the hard-cores, who swore it was something telepathic, time-travel-inclined, or something faster than the speed of light that could finally be used in a larger, more person-sized dose. There was quite a lot of speculation about this one, all of it mentioned, at least once in the article, quantum something or other.
There were quite a few others, hopeful of miracle cures for various diseases, some new financial wizardry (hoping his survival in the suburbs with no obvious means of support meant he'd cracked it), or any of a number of specialist inventions.
In the end, they were all wrong.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
Sorry about that.
Do you have a favourite book? Great, that's just great.
No, we don't want to know about it.
Do you have a least favourite book? So least favourite you hate to put the word favourite any where near it? In fact, you might describe your feelings for this book as 'hating it'? Is it anything by Agatha Christie? Or Henry James? How about something less obvious and universally accepted as drivel?
Well, we still don't really want to hear about it, but The Independent want to hear about it! They're running an article on the BBC's choice of the Worst 100 Books of All-Time, and are planning on publishing a reader-chosen list of their own! You could be famous! Imagine!
Tell them we sent you. Or don't. It's not like we're going to get any special cake or anything for having pointed this thing out. Unless an employee of the Independent is reading this and happens to have some spare cake in the breakroom and wants to send it on. Then we will, but that's not why we're doing this, really.
I mean, we like cake and all, but we like books, too. And we like making sure people know which books are good, and, as the complement, which books suck.
If you do happen to vote for your least favourite book of all time, and you do happen to vote for, say, Time, a novel, we would, at the very least hope that you vote for in the spirit that Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut was: namely, that you can't get your hands on the book for love nor money these days.
|
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.