Twitter is down for maintenance again, that god-damn, good-for-nothin’… alright, my anger doesn’t run that deep (I’m sorry, I love you). It’s still worrisome. Imagine if MySpace were offline for the same amount of time per day — thousands of naive little teenagers would twitch and cry and approach that terrible brink that we now term “emo.” Indeed, the scale is much smaller, but the results are equally devastating. I can’t imagine what they’re doing to the API that requires the causing of so much pain and detachment among their users. Example: what am I to do, now that my tweets are hours and hours late? I could possibly turn into a wailing lemonade kiosk — probably not, but the possibility is there regardless. A word to you, Obvious: lemonade kiosks are known for their savagery and inhuman strength. And their fangs. Their savage, wailing fangs.
Of course, that apocalypse is already in motion. That which keeps this violent lemonade kiosk rolling towards our eventual destruction is the same as that which has kept the e-Illuminati (that would be you; you may now clap and cheer) on their toes for the past week. It’s called perpetual copyright, thought up by a silly man named Mark Halperin. In his New York Times Op. Ed. article entitled “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?”, Halperin compares intellectual property — that is, ideas — to physical property — billion-dollar tangerines, and explores the virtues — indeed, there are few — of making the ownership of intellectual and physical property … identical. A copyright would never expire, the public domain would be swept out of the water, and all this because “… ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright”?
Copyright, as the opposition argues is nothing more than a reward for a promotion of intellectual works. What Helprin, ideally wants, is for a work to continue to provide for its creator and his family and his descendants, and for the copyright of that work to remain with its creator for all time. He argues the following:
Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else?
There’s no point in lying any more; we’re living in an age that is preoccupied with destruction, and it’s extremely evident. Nukes, televangelists (adios, Jerry Falwell), precisely aimed bird-poo bullets — we’re all against one another, unless my spidey-senses have failed me yet again. So let’s take a step back, past Iran-Contra, past Blackbeard, past the fall of the western Roman Empire, past the birth of Ann Coulter…
Let’s go back to the beginning of things. “Ah,” but you ask, wittily stroking your chin, “which beginning do you want?” — because life is full of those choose-your-own-adventures that we so often wish we could bypass by flipping back to before things went wrong, or ahead to when things are simply peachy. The beginning of the earth is but one of these adventures. There is not one creation; there are, in fact, three categories of creation that are bound to confuse and perplex unless clearly delineated. The first is a strictly religious interpretation. The second is exclusively scientific in nature (assuming that religion is to literature and scripture as science is to observation and experimentation; in essence, the reputedly “unchangeable record of life” against its sneaky ghost-authored sequel). The third path melds elements from the former two into something that speaks of a divine entity, in concept alone, but still uses the laws of science to explain this theory.
So this, my children, this is the beginning of the world.
Sometimes, I imagine myself to be an anti-elephant. The forgetful type. And without the magical trunk action. But most importantly, I’m rather unorganized and I haven’t done much to remedy this situation. I’ve tried carrying around a planner — goodness knows that this didn’t take any extra effort, seeing as I carry around an office supply store in my purse — and I’ve even gone as far — regularly — as using my skin as a canvas. Unfortunately, this latter invention of mine (I haven’t quite named it yet; favorites include “Derm Paper” and “Oh My God, Is That Your Hand?”) doesn’t work well with water. But I’ve branched away from these material things; I know I can’t be trusted with them. That leaves a whole mess of things for the Internet, my old best friend, to remedy — in stylish and previously unheard of (Pope Leo X had a prophecy of this nature, but he dismissed it as an attack of indigestion) ways!
Have your notes and keep them too
Stikkit, although assumed to be nothing more than a pretty (pretty pretty) face, has come back to haunt me. I initially rejoiced in the idea of transmuting the numerous Post-It Notes I tried to put on my monitor (I knocked them off in spastic fits) into online sticky notes — stikkits. Although I loved the idea, I never really learned to use Stikkit in a productive way.
