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beerness-feet-sticky
also continued from last week as well...
The skateboard didn't quite fly like people were kind of hoping/expected.
In fact, it was remarkably like a lot of skateboards people had seen before. In that it had four wheels set on two trucks. It had a big plank of flat thing that you stood on. It had a bit of rugged stuff that your feet could grip well so you didn't slip off that big plank of flat thing while riding it.
There were some sort of things that made it a smoother ride than any skateboard ever, "like floating on air almost, only you were on the ground," Rasselas said, "and the FAA wouldn't allow them even low clearance takeoffs without more rigourous testing of the flaps." There were flaps, which did something to stabilise the rider at faster speeds. There was something special about the material used inthe large flat plank people would stand on.
The press, as you might imagine, was less than favourable. Especially when not many of them considered skateboarding something radically history-direction-changing. Even Skateboarding Magazine wasn't particularly thrilled. They gave it decent reviews, but had to admit, themselves, that a skateboard with a bit of grip that made it easier for other folks to stay standing on a skateboard for an extended period of time wasn't exactly earthshaking.
All in all, the hype of pre-announcement "Spicy Cheese" was almost equalled by the post-announcement come-down hype.
Thankfully, perhaps, the let-down wasn't as immediate as the internet press could be: anyone providing a real-time blog of the press event was more or less too stunned to write anything substantial. Well, let's put that another way: they were dumbfounded by what they were seeing, which was a rather large grown man tottering around the stage on an elegant white plastic skateboard. The sort of thing which tends to work a lot like a muse, only in reverse.
The plasma screens looked as if they'd frozen as the latest rumours ground to a halt.
The flashes of the assembled photographers went off crazily, perhaps in the hope that they might catch the moment in which his magic craft took off, which presumably everyone who'd ever seen Back to the Future was expecting it to do.
The atmosphere resembled the moment in a sci-fi film in which time is frozen and only those 'special' characters are allowed the god-like ability to move amongst the frozen masses like they existed in an invisible dressing to which only themselves could retire to collect their thoughts.
This illusion was less convincing when the intern standing beside me gave me a withering look when I pinched her arm to test my powers.
While she went back to panning the technical team's video camera around the room of this historic event, I looked down at my own laptop keyboard, on which my fingers were resting embarrassingly inert.
I just couldn't write anything. I started to think about that, and it just made it more impossible to write anything. I tried out the word 'white' in a new text document. Didn't do anything for me. Didn't seem natural, whereas normally typing white was as natural as typing my own name. Sometimes my fingers got ahead of themselves and white became whiet, but that was quickly corrected by the spellchecker, which probably knew me a lot better than some former girlfriends. Or at least understood and put up with my habits better than some of them.
Instead of panicking in front of a blank document, I closed the lid of the laptop and looked up at the podium, which the inventor was just swooping to after a lazy looping arc around the stage on his new revelation.
He explained a few technical things. The sort of things people write down, but no one in the audience did. A few of the younger pups initially tried to write down the specs, but grew increasingly fidgety as his speech wore on until they finally ground to a slow, graceless halt. They looked like ants that had been busily bringing things back to the nest when some joker poured a can of tree sap on them. At first they resisted the sap and tried to make as much movement as they were allowed, but then, it happened-- they were just ants, and the sap, well, the sap was sap, and it got harder to move until things reached the point where the ants were destined to end up on someone's mantelpiece ten thousand years in the future as an interesting historical knickknack.
When Rasselas concluded the press conference after a gully of five minutes of silence from the press corps, there was a dampened buzz of both movement and sound, the two of them so discreet that sound and movement were indistinguishable. People made their way towards the exit in a dazed fashion. Others stayed rooted to their seats and mumbled things at their nearest neighbors or themselves.
Slowly, like watching a dam crack and then finally break, only to reveal it hadn't been holding anything back but a large tuft of cotton candy, news began trickling across the wire and the screens still flanking the podium.
"It was like the skateboard in Back to the Future, only slightly less cool!" said one.
"Stable skateboard," was all another could muster.
"History-Redefining Thing Rumoured to be Forgotten at Inventor's House, Team Member's Son's Skateboard Demo'd Instead," claimed another.
After a little more perspective, away from the conference room, time to think things over and contemplate exactly what it was they say, and with the absolute lack of notes anyone managed to take, however, things got much worse.
To be continued, one last time...
disclaimer:
The horoscopes turn 300 this week.
That is a whole lot of predicting.
We did some mildly scientific research this past week on various focus groups, and our initial findings show that our horoscopes are accurate to 87%. Not too shabby, not too mind-bogglingly accurate, either, that you might suspect we, like the ancient Egyptians, had help in designing our horoscopes. Not that the Egyptians messed about with horoscopes too much. But those pyramids, I mean, come on.
We're going to be a little slow this week (as you may have noticed), and next week. It's all due, as we mentioned last week, to WWDC, the Apple show for developer geeky types.
Yes, we know that by next week the conference will have ended, but you know how these kids recover these days, all those twenty four hour days in the dot-com heyday did something to their brains, we fear, and they tend to recover from all the surprises a little slower than they might have before.
That or our writers or stunned from getting through 300 of those damn horoscopes.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes.