Jeroen Percival Jesus » irony

conspicuous consumption

jpj — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:52:55 +0000

As if the iPhone on its own wasn’t enough of a consumer piece, how about the following application:

Last week, an application turned the iPhone into a megaphone to proclaim: “I Am Rich.” That is the name of a downloadable program that promised to do nothing except signal to the world that its buyer was wealthy enough to have spent $1,000 to download an image of a multifaceted ruby.

It’s almost beautiful as an art piece exposing human vanity, but doesn’t seem to play well in the actual context of the iPhone’s App Store. From the New York Times.

this is, of course, from a man who knows about getting drunk

jpj — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:43:18 +0000

George Bush seems determined to stay clever and relevant:

US President George W Bush has explained the credit crunch savaging US financial markets by saying “Wall Street got drunk”.
“It got drunk and now it’s got a hangover,” Mr Bush said at a private political fundraiser in Houston, Texas.

Good that he’s going with what he knows metaphor-wise.

“The question is, how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?” the president asks in the clip.

I think there’s probably less prosaic ways to describe the issues, or whether the issues were limits and not fancy instruments. But whatever, this is the festival of bad ideas.

“Not in Houston, evidently not in Dallas, because Laura’s over there trying to buy a house today,” he says to the crowd’s laughter.
Mr Bush said they were looking for somewhere to live when they leave Washington, DC, as Mrs Bush no longer wanted to live on their ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Apparently, some other village in texas is getting a village idiot. Is that a one-per-village job or is there a hierarchy? Calculated Risk is a good place to read about the reality of the housing crisis. These quotes are from an article in bbc news, which hasn’t yet succumbed to outrage fatigue.

best youtube video ever

jpj — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:04:36 +0000

yeah. just like that.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to look very, very stupid

jpj — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:00:18 +0000

Tongodeon points out the Air Force’s fetching new slogan:

Someone has clearly not been paying attention to history, even military history. That’s a direct translation of Germany’s Über Alles, which I’m not going to even provide a google link to because it leads to all sorts of racist retardness that might get people who read this at work in trouble. (Instead, please accept this link to The Dead Kennedy’s California Über Alles.)

The Nazis weren’t the original context of the quote, it’s from a poem in 1841 Germany, but you still have to wonder WTF the air force public affairs officers who came up with that were thinking.