Saturday, June 29, 2013
Friday, June 28, 2013
The Nine Billion Names Of God
After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke I’d already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.
“Let me ask you something,” the man said. I didn’t argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think you’re interested.
“Have you ever created a web site?”
I shook my head.
“Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?”
“Nope.”
“What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didn’t even have an AOL site or something?”
“Do I look like an AOL user to you?” For the record, I don’t think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. “I’m sure I have something, somewhere,” I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.
“You know what Google is?”
“Yes,” I said. I was running low on patience.
“No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?”
Reluctantly, I shook my head.
“You ever meet anyone who worked for them?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You haven’t. Nobody works for them anymore.”
I shrugged, and took the man’s empty pint. I didn’t offer to refill it.
“They’re self-contained. It’s all automated, in there. It’s underground.”
I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. “Why don’t you eat something?” I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.
“Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works,” he said, but didn’t want for a response. “They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when you’re searching, you’re not even searching the internet.”
I’ve heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. “Same thing, though,” I said.
“You ever wonder why Google doesn’t cache it’s own searches?”
“They program around it.”
“No. That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?”
“It’s still a part of the internet, though.”
“No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.”
The man had a point. I nodded.
“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”
Gradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. “You think it’s sentient.”
“I know it’s sentient.”
“How?”
He smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. “Me and Google go way back. But what I’m saying is,” he continued, “It knows us. All of us. It is us.”
For the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.
“Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. It’s one of the nine billion names of God.”
Alec Baldwin Loses It In Homophobic Twitter Rant
Alec Baldwin calls gay reporter: "toxic little queen" and threatening, "I Am gonna f--k you up."
Will Capital One Drop Him As A Spokesman?
Will Saturday Night Live Broadcast His Upcoming Appearance?
Alec Baldwin is taking another breather from Twitter—and it's probably for the best.
The former 30 Rock star pulled the plug on his @ABFalecBaldwin account Thursday after lashing out at the U.K.'s Daily Mail for claiming in a story that his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, was tweeting "upbeat posts" while the couple attended James Gandolfini's funeral.
Shortly before doing so, Baldwin heaped scorn on the newspaper's reporter George Stark in a series of tweets, at one point, per Buzzfeed, calling him a "toxic little queen" and threatening, "I Am gonna f--k you up."
"My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this f--king trash," he wrote. "My wife DID NOT use her phone, in any capacity, at our friend's funeral. Now f--k this twitter + good luck to all of you who know the truth."
The 55-year-old thesp added that he fired his publicist in the wake of the kerfuffle.
What set Alec off was Stark's pointed accusation that Hilaria violated funeral etiquette when he wrote, "The pregnant yoga instructor's social media feed was full of upbeat posts while the Sopranos star's friends, family and co-stars were gripped with grief at a New York Catholic Church."
The writer pointed to tweets by Baldwin's missus about wedding anniversary gifts and an upcoming appearance on Rachel Ray.
That drew a sharp rebuke from Hilaria, who tweeted: "Here is some info... When someone tweets something at a certain time, and you retweet it later, it posts the TIME the first person tweeted."
This isn't the first time, though, that Baldwin has gone AWOL from Twitter. Baldwin famously quit the microblogging site for a brief spell in December 2011 after launching a fiery tirade against American Airlines only to return a month later.
Whether or not he resumes his Twitter habit, undoubtedly he could use the time away to cool off. But the couple did release a statement in the aftermath of his latest rant, calling the whole matter "disgraceful."
"It's disgraceful that a reporter would manufacture and publish a story and not call for comment or explanation—especially when it's intended to take away attention from honoring the memory of a beloved figure like James Gandolfini," said the Baldwins. "There are multiple witnesses to the fact that Hilaria left her phone in the car and wouldn't, couldn't, and didn't tweet during the service...And as for the tweets—1) some of the time stamps in the report were wrong because he listed the time of the original tweet not the retweet 2) she left early and wasn't in the service at the time of tweeting 3) it's possible that a previously scheduled tweet wasn't canceled."
http://www.eonline.com/news/434766/alec-baldwin-quits-twitter-again-after-defending-wife-hilaria-in-latest-rant
More On The Out-Of-Control Alec Baldwin:
Will Capital One Drop Him As A Spokesman?
Will Saturday Night Live Broadcast His Upcoming Appearance?
Alec Baldwin is taking another breather from Twitter—and it's probably for the best.
The former 30 Rock star pulled the plug on his @ABFalecBaldwin account Thursday after lashing out at the U.K.'s Daily Mail for claiming in a story that his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, was tweeting "upbeat posts" while the couple attended James Gandolfini's funeral.
Shortly before doing so, Baldwin heaped scorn on the newspaper's reporter George Stark in a series of tweets, at one point, per Buzzfeed, calling him a "toxic little queen" and threatening, "I Am gonna f--k you up."
"My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this f--king trash," he wrote. "My wife DID NOT use her phone, in any capacity, at our friend's funeral. Now f--k this twitter + good luck to all of you who know the truth."
The 55-year-old thesp added that he fired his publicist in the wake of the kerfuffle.
What set Alec off was Stark's pointed accusation that Hilaria violated funeral etiquette when he wrote, "The pregnant yoga instructor's social media feed was full of upbeat posts while the Sopranos star's friends, family and co-stars were gripped with grief at a New York Catholic Church."
The writer pointed to tweets by Baldwin's missus about wedding anniversary gifts and an upcoming appearance on Rachel Ray.
That drew a sharp rebuke from Hilaria, who tweeted: "Here is some info... When someone tweets something at a certain time, and you retweet it later, it posts the TIME the first person tweeted."
This isn't the first time, though, that Baldwin has gone AWOL from Twitter. Baldwin famously quit the microblogging site for a brief spell in December 2011 after launching a fiery tirade against American Airlines only to return a month later.
Whether or not he resumes his Twitter habit, undoubtedly he could use the time away to cool off. But the couple did release a statement in the aftermath of his latest rant, calling the whole matter "disgraceful."
http://www.eonline.com/news/434766/alec-baldwin-quits-twitter-again-after-defending-wife-hilaria-in-latest-rant
More On The Out-Of-Control Alec Baldwin:
Why Does Capital One Employ Alec Baldwin?
Leaving The Democrat Plantation....
He is about to become the most discriminated against man on earth.
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