Now that it’s down almost 30% after it’s opening, some analysts are predicting Facebook will go the way of MySpace. Do you click on the ads? If you don’t, and it seems nobody does, then Young Zuck’s in trouble.
BAKER STREET
by Eric J Baker
At 9 a.m. this past Friday, Facebook’s IPO was the most supercalifragilisticexpialidocious event ever, worth more than 100 Avengers movies and better than carrot cake on Fat Bitch Sunday. By noon, the whole thing was Snakes on a Plane: A bit of hype and then quickly forgotten. The only thing I want to know is if Bono really made 1.5 billion dollars on the deal, or was that just phantom wealth, like America’s before the real estate crash.
On the other hand, one Avengers movie was enough for Robert Downey Jr. to rake in a quick 50 million dollars, and that’s money in the bank if Disney doesn’t get too creative with the accounting. Not bad for a troubled ex-con. If I’m Chris Evans, I’m restructuring my deal for Avengers II to bring my salary closer to the double-digit millions. That is an obvious statement, but it gives me an excuse to run another picture of Evans, who’s a click magnet for us.
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough
Well, it appears that I’m stupid. Or at least not nearly as intelligent as I think I am.
That’s no surprise. My father once asked me, after telling me my whole life what a genius I was, “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not as smart as you think you are?” This might have had something to do with dropping out of college for the second time. I don’t remember. I just tucked the statement away in my trophy cabinet of family resentments—it falls to me to keep them shiny and updated—and only vaguely recollect the circumstance, just how his face was red and his jowls were shaking.
We must, of course, lead with a picture of Mama G. shashaying in her favorite nougat muu muu. I never got to comment about how she kept a scrapbook of clippings dedicated to her obsession, Condoleezza Rice. Had the revolution never happened, Rice was going to be her Halloween outfit.
I joined Facebook very late in the game and still remain extremely ambivalent about it. No, I’m not ambivalent. I think it’s… Not my thing, to avoid other invectives. I find it really creepy, for instance, that it seems to know that I have some connection to someone I do have a connection with, but Facebook couldn’t possibly know given my current friends list because there are no mutual friend connections to that other someone. Facebook just knows.
Yes, this is a deliberately provocative title. No, I have no idea how big Zuckerberg’s dick is, but with a bank account that hung, who cares?
Facebook is not for the modern misanthrope, and I am no exception. I don’t care what your mood is, what you’re thinking, whom you’ve tagged, whom you want to overthrow. I understand it’s the hugest, biggest social revolution in the whole wild world ever, and I heartily applaud positive events that it has helped engender, the Egyptian revolution in particular and the shaking of the Arab world in general, out the private middle ages that it’s in. Teens harassing teens into suicide and stuff like that is unfortunate, but not Facebook’s fault; that’s more the bullying culture of America, which needs to be addressed in another manner.
I have two Facebook accounts, one to promote this blog and a personal one, and I have no idea why I did that because I only go on there to promote this blog, and then I dash off again before the chattering crowds drown me with their thoughts and likes and comments and links. I think I have a combined eighty friends from both accounts, and that really surprises me; I didn’t know that there were eighty people I liked, much less who liked me. And that’s perfectly fine; I have no desire to be popular, no will to amass more friends than I already have.