idm

What I attended:

What I expected:

What I got:

Coding furiously to magically appropriate James Bond action music would be more of a thrill if it didn’t have to be interrupted by goofy failure music every time a bug needed debugging.

What ever happened to the movie song? What happened to Björk in her absurd swan dress, whispering and croaking to the audience with just half a duet? What happened to Elliott Smith in his favorite white suit — we miss you still, Elliott — rowing futilely against Celine Dion’s triple-octave range and the Hollywood Machine?

For starters, where was Peter Gabriel last night?

Match-ups that need settling:

• Yoshimi vs. the Pink Robots
• Master Chief vs. the Wicked Witch of the West
• Ned (the Pie Maker) vs. Goldfinger
• The Big Lebowski vs. Flavor Flav
• Snoop Dogg vs. Martha Stewart
• Catwoman vs. Cardinal Richelieu, with goonies
• Nicholas Tesla vs. Hackers
• Christopher Walken vs. David Bowie
• M. C. Escher vs. Stephen Hawking
• Daft Punk vs. HAL 9000
• Spider-Man vs. Barack Obama
• Cruella de Vil vs. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• The Grinch vs. the RIAA
• Scientology vs. Steve Ballmer with chair
• Yoda vs. Morgan Freeman’s voice

Armed with the powers of GPS and cell-tower triangulation for rough ballparking, and accelerometer devices for fine-grained twice-integrated three-dimensional positioning, twenty-first century socio-techno-philes can now pinpoint the exact location of any properly-equipped, interwebs-capable, hyphenation-resistant device.

In other words, responsibility now falls upon anxious shoulders of the hackers and tinkerers of the gadget world to come up with worthwhile applications for location awareness. To get started, here are a few things on which you could understandably want to stick a tracking device:

• A cat or a dog — set its allowable boundaries, and be notified of its location when it escapes. You could try calling it, too.
• A small child — same reasoning, really.
• Joggers — if you want to know how far you’ve moved, vertical “bounce” included. Doesn’t work particularly well on treadmills, though.
• Kites — if you want to know exactly how high and above what spot on the ground your kite is, but can’t be bothered to use a protractor and compass with some trigonometry, you lazy whippersnapper.
• Bank robbers’ vans — all that’s missing is a projectile weapon capable of shooting homing devices buried within wads of Katamari-level stickiness.
• Your own cell phone — no more asking someone to call it and trying to pinpoint the source of that outrageous sound which you insist is a ringtone.

Get working, people.

If I wanted to see Keanu as Spike, I’d just go back and rewatch some old episodes, mentally dubbing each of his sharply philosophical lines with a deadpan “Whoa.”