My Top Ten
Posted by Rube | 22 January, 2005
Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!
She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.
The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.
That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.
How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?
This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.
As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.
I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.
I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.
Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.
I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.
Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.
