ATTENTION: AMAZON.COM

That I liked Firefly does not, in fact, imply that I would be interested in a wormy turd shat onto a greasy paper plate by Joss Whedon.

Really.

Also, that I confessed to having enjoyed Akira should not suggest my interest in watching big-eyed anime schoolgirls being sodomized by tentacle monsters. Though, I admit some culpability here. I never should have told you about Berserk. How was I to know that it would cause hundreds of seemingly identical DVDs to appear in my recommendations with unwieldy names and featuring box art of freakish, wide-eyes pixies with improbable hair colors? It was my assumption that positively rating a show in which a man cuts a horse--and its rider--in half with an unreasonably large sword would attract similar programs.

My mistake, perhaps.

However, it was no mistake of mine when I told you that I enjoyed Mastodon's Crack the Skye, and you accosted me with aural abortions like Behold... the Arctopus.

(Honestly, I don't know what you were thinking in this case. I can only assume that you are now--and perhaps always have been--deliberately fucking with me.)

Finally, my interest in television shows such as The Wire does not--in any universe--lead to an interest in the entire run of Everybody Loves Raymond. Similarly, that I individually purchased all six season of The Sopranos does not mean I have the faintest interest in purchasing all six seasons again in one bulk purchase for a sale price of $278.

I ALREADY FUCKING OWN THEM, YOU SEE.

All is not piss and vinegar, however. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a fine suggestion for someone who enjoyed The Searchers. (Unfortunately I already own that movie, and thus your recommendation was no fucking help whatsoever.) I will even admit a strange sort of accidental logic behind suggesting El Dorado based on Rio Bravo (as they are--despite Howard Hawk's protests to the contrary--the same fucking movie).

In conclusion: HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES AM I GOING TO HAVE TO CLICK "NOT INTERESTED" ON A DRAGONBALL Z DVD UNTIL YOU GET THE FUCKING MESSAGE?

Who Was King of Bavaria During the Seven Years' War?

There are fools out there who will tell you that it is liberating to be without the Internet. They will say that it makes one more focused, more creative, more productive, more (fill in your own empty buzz word here). They will say this to you with a straight face, and they may even believe it. Ask any one of these people to show you the issue of a night of Internet-free productivity, however, and they will invariably come up with empty hands.

I find that time without the Internet is exhausting, and I am no practitioner of the great hoax on civil human society that is “web 2.0.” I check my e-mail once a day, steadfastly refuse to send messages (instant or otherwise), and am a proud non-participant in the dog-and-pony show of “social networking.”

No, what I miss about the Internet during those times when I suffer without is information. You may remember the promise of an “information age” that was made to us some few decades ago. The Internet, it was said, would be a vast library of not only formal, fixed scholarship, but also the raw, ugly matter of pure human experience. Then, some idiot figured out that you could use the Internet to meet people for sex.

The Internet is an adjunct to the brain. The human brain evolved to fit a very basic set of requirements: processing environmental stimuli, maintaining a store of information on past events, and the ability to extrapolate future events from a combination of the two below. These requirements are themselves mere sub-routines of a primary process: to avoid dying, at least until successful reproduction. Art, literature, dreams, writing, law, compassion, affection even love all owe themselves to the successful operation of our unique jelly.

The brain, however, does a few things rather poorly. One is recalling detailed information accurately. We evolved to process just enough information to save our lives, which is why we focus on the gun during a stick-up rather than the offender’s facial characteristics. Your brain doesn’t care a whit for accurate police testimony. It only cares about living. The other thing our brains do poorly is retain large amounts of information. Again, in nature it is simply not needed. You need only be aware of danger and safety, food and not food, predator and prey. The human today—compared to the human of even 1000 years ago—hold stores of information that are vast, and wholly unnecessary to survival.

Consider the question I asked at the beginning. No, the very beginning. Doubtless there are many people in the world who can answer a question like that from memory. There are even more who cannot. Before the Internet you had two options for discovering that kind of information:

1) Ask someone who is more knowledgeable than you.
2) Find the answer in a book.

The first option necessitated knowing someone who could answer the question, of course. The second would require either owning a book containing the answer or knowing where to find one. In the old days (of which I lived several) this meant a trip to the library.

(Now, a note to my fellow purists: I am neither suggesting that the Internet is a substitute for a good library, nor that words printed on a screen are superior to ones printed on paper. I am a firm believer in books, and am further convinced that no innovation will obsoletize ink on wood pulp technology for a very, very long time.)

However, the Internet can save you such a trip on matters of minutae. Say you’re writing a great novel about the life of Richard Wagner, and you need to know who ruled Bavaria when he wrote Lohengrin. You don’t need a complete run-down of his duties as monarch, or his foreign policy stance re: Prussia, you just need his name so that you won’t have to come back and fill in countless “KING SO-AND-SO” stand-ins the next day. The Internet fills small voids in knowledge in a timely manner, and does so magnificently.

(Though I should say to fellow victims of the humanities that a wealth of primary sources can be found on the Internet, if you’re game.)

Still, a grain of salt, as they say.

We are, sadly, conditioned to despise the technology that facilitates and enriches our lives. Again and again we are told that the witless savages of the stone age were in every way our moral and cultural superiors; That their ignorance of letters, science, and even the basic fundaments of law were not deficiencies against which they had to endure, but blessings! Intellect, many of us believe, is a curse, and its fruits diseased.

That is because we are creatures of our age, and like all creatures we think that our age is the worst one yet. Who hasn’t felt the dreadful gravity of the not-so-distant savage that still inhabits his mammal brain? It can be easy to imagine that life was better before soap, penicillin, and birth control. Part of us actually believes that. It tells us to shut off the Internet and the air conditioner, and labor in sweat and isolation. If it had its way it would relegate us to painting our thoughts in charcoal pictograms on the walls of our apartments. Even that wouldn’t be primitive enough in the end. Only when man is slumbering in a cold and damp cave, swathed in a cloud of his own bodily funk, with no more regard for the future than the source of his next meal and orgasm, will that deep, bestial part of us be satisfied.

Ignore him. Embrace technology. Love it. When it’s absent, miss it. If it ever leaves us, mourn it. It has been mankind’s truest, noblest friend.

True Tales From the Shallow South

I recently went to my city's lavish civic center (and by lavish I mean largely barren, and by civic I mean "next to an empty lot underneath an overpass that would make a great lair for a hobo serial killer").

The local classic rock station had assured me--between Nickelback and Charlie Daniels Band--that an "Electronics Expo" was to be held there, and that phenomenal deals were to be found on

CAR STEREOS DVD PLAYERS BLU-RAY PLAYERS HOME SECURITY SYSTEMS RADAR DETECTORS B61 NUCLEAR BOMB FUSES and FUTURISTIC SEX DOLLS!

I was skeptical.

My father was not.

We arrived at the site in the late afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to melt into the dingy urban haze. A familiar, greasy smell filled the air that I forever associate with elephant ears and cheap, rural carnivals. Around us milled a throng of teen and preteen girls.

"Must be here for the futuristic sex dolls," I said. My father frowned.

This was troubling, being a party consisting solely of two adult ogres, adrift amid a sea of flowers in various stages of bloom. My father, being older and wiser, was more sensitive to the awkwardness of the situation than I, and he suggested that we quickly find out "where the fuck we are going before security asks us to empty our pockets."

We hacked bravely through the pre-oestral thicket, and while we incurred a few nonplussed looks from nigh-obese guardians with drooping fanny packs, we finally made our way to a clearing. There, upon either side of us, were two signs consisting of 8.5x11 sheets of printer paper fixed to a sign holder. The text was, predictably, some member of the twisted Arial font family.

This was one of those cruel reminders of time and place: my current co-ordinates in cultural and social space-time. I was--quite literally--between the Cheetah Girls and a Gun Show.

That revelation was my second reaction. My first reaction was "What the fuck are Cheetah Girls?"

The throng of women-children veered to the left in a great arc, as if pulled by a source of tremendous gravity (or perhaps repelled by the opposite). My father and I remained before the dreadful sigils, straddling the barrier between two strange and terrifying worlds.

Without a word my father turned and began to head right, following the instructions of the second sign. In those moments where I drifted, contemplating my place and purpose in the universe, confronting the terror that I was finally and irrevocably out of fucking touch, my father was reading the cultural geography.

An electronics expo, he reasoned, would naturally occur closer to a gun show, just as a stream's source must fall near a mountain, and a swamp must lie near the sea.

Would a truck pull be far behind?

I'll tease the reader no longer: we never made it to the electronics expo. After navigating a chubby wilderness of orange vests and woodland-print coveralls we found that the touted expo was charging eight dollars for admission. Savings indeed! Dreams of home security blu-ray sexbots dissolved in my head into a murky solution, which then boiled down to a brownish powder, eventually burning away and leaving only acrid smoke.

We left in near total defeat, my only consolation being the knowledge I had gained--bitter though it was.

My father was considerably more Zen about it.

"At least they validated my parking."