#620 Join the 21st

I think we are not entirely comfortable with the 21st century and the computer age. The vicissitudes of spam, email, and all things computerese cause daily flights and plummets of consternation.
I once spoke to a room full of people in which half of them were over 60. When someone told me he didn’t get an email I had sent, I remarked in a deadpan voice that it was probably because they didn’t deliver email on holidays. Just about everyone over sixty bought it.
I have a friend who had problems with his email. Or possibly his server, he wasn’t entirely sure. So he emailed himself to check it.
We thought that process was best described by the word email-sturbation.
Ultimately is can cause problems of its own. It can make the images in your monitor fade. Worse, if you use a PDA, it could make your palm pilot get hairy.
But one of the biggest threats facing the computer world is a disproportionate number of boys, as opposed to girls, buy computer video games.
The industry is worried.
Young girls make up a huge proportion of the whining-till-parents-buy-it consumer base. If the videogame industry could somehow capitalize on that...
There’s an online game now much favored by little girls that seems to be close. It’s about penguins or something.
The key appears to be that there’s a social aspect with other players. And apparently it also teaches little girls to shop.
Yahoo.
Let’s hold on to those cultural stereotypes—fashion and shopping, the two biggest educational tools to prepare one for international diplomacy and scientific research.
Not that most shoot-em-up video games for boys are any better. Somehow racing around streets in stolen autos and rolling ladies of the evening is not what I would want for social training either. And the attempt to sweep girls in, with that one ill-conceived video game really wasn’t good at all. What was it called? Oh yeah, Grand Theft Rainbow Pony. I’m glad that idea didn’t fly.
Stealing and riding sparkly rainbow ponies while you blew away cops was far worse than a trip to the penguin equivalent of the Gap.
America, ya gotta love it