And now for something completely different:

A man with a laptop up his nose.

File this under: “The new techporn is here! The new techporn is here!”

So first I look.



And then the “gottahaveit” switch in my prefrontal lobes kicks in.

The one that has betrayed my meager exchequer and impelled me (or my parents, or Santa), over the years, into such ill-advised purchases as Giant Magnets, Real Ghosts (balloons with white vinyl sheets), X-Ray Glasses, crappy walkie-talkies, Skittle Pool, a million Chinese finger traps, the Marshall Brodine “Professional Magician” kit, a Ronco Record Selector, various shoes and pants choices I’d rather we never discuss, something I only remember as the “Monsteroop Maker” which excreted some kind of molded candy, a plastic insect making machine that used ingredients suspiciously similar to the Monsteroop candy maker and gave off a smell like an industrial fire..

And of course that high-voltage, ominously-humming, jittery football game dealie where the “players” just twitched around for a few seconds like plastic army men taking a course of electroshock treatments and then shamble in the general direction of the “ball”, where they mill about like plastic army men who need to pee after their shock treatments.

For those of you that never played it, it was sort of like the Republican National Convention, but with a more coherent objective and 60% less Zell Miller.

And now comes this from the NYT to tempt a weak man towards sinnin’.

March 9, 2006
Now, a Laptop You Can Hold in Your Hand
By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

HANOVER, Germany, March 8 — In a bid to crack the crowded market for hand-held computers and music players, Microsoft and two electronics companies, Samsung of Korea and Asus of Taiwan, plan to unveil an ultralight tablet computer on Thursday that melds a laptop and media player into a thin, new device.

Samsung's device, the Q1, will use Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. It is a product of Microsoft's so-called Origami project — an effort to shrink and redefine the laptop, while bolstering the company's software sales for new hand-held devices. Asus will also produce a version.

"This is basically a small but powerful laptop computer that is also a sophisticated entertainment device," said Patrick Pavel, a Samsung product manager for Germany, who showed a prototype of the Q1 on Wednesday at the Cebit technology fair in Hanover.
The Samsung device is a flat black rectangle that weighs 1.7 pounds, has the dimensions of a DVD box (about 9 inches by 5 inches) and is 1 inch thick. The viewing screen is 7 inches diagonally, more than twice the size of most personal digital assistants or Internet-enabled smart phones.
…

Representatives of Microsoft, Samsung and Asus discussed the new devices but declined to release further details before a news conference to be held here on Thursday. An executive of one company involved in the project, who would not speak for attribution before the news conference, said the tablet computers would sell for $600 to $1,200 each.
Like a personal digital assistant, the Q1 can be operated with a metal stylus by writing and clicking on the screen. The device, which comes with a 40-gigabyte hard drive, can also be operated with a wireless keyboard.
…

And I predictably drool and lapse into digital glossy-olalia (the speaking in concupiscent tongues over all things shiny and programmable), except now I look back on the good, cool toys of my past – my Spirograph and Etch-a-Sketch and Rock Computer – and I realize that they each generated the same form of irresistibility: a week after I got them I was still engaged and still playing with them for some very simple reasons.

They were easy to use and interactive. You pick ‘em up, you got the A-B-Cs right away, and mastering them subtleties was half the fun.

They didn’t try to do a million things; they did one thing supremely well and without a lot of fussy, moving parts and add-ons.

They were perfectly, irreducibly themselves. They had a… noumenal identity and nothing could replace them.

And so while I acknowledge and even celebrate the naked consumerist lust in my heart for all things glistening, having skipped lightly throught the first two stages of techlust, this bit of genius from Spinal Tap comes floating back to me:

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

And I’m old enough now to imagine myself a year from now (with the Dems having won back the entire Congress and Libidinous Liberal Lasses flocking to castle driftglass for celebratory drinks and assorted naughty bad goodness), holding a battered Origami whatsit and asking no one in particular,

“OK, it was bigger than an iPod, and smaller than a laptop, and could do pretty much what they could do.

“And sure, it was ‘One louder’

but now it comes with pixel streaking (You mean where the run nekkid across the screen? No.), a couple of cracks, a coffee ring, chocolate fingerprints and just a hint of cat pee from The Unpleasantness after the gato expressed its disapproval of my post-election debauchery.

“So why did I plunk down over a grand for this particular E-Z-Bake Oven With Kung-Fu Grip again?”