Weekly Dose of Dangle

I have been on a media cleanse for almost a month now, something that would have been it impossible when I was doing the comic strip. No Talking Points Memo, no Huffington, no Matt Taibbi, no Truthout, not even Wonkette. In the evening I've left the TV off and spent time hanging out with my son listening to his jokes. It's far superior entertainment, especially compared to the show, The Last Word, which really sucks.

Review of the Ipad 2

I got an Ipad 2. I saw some animated layered painting Peter Durand was doing on one and thought, I must have one. I kept talking to Hae about iPads and how cool they were until finally she broke under the pressure and bought me one for my birthday. I want to love it because I know what a "disruptive" product it is, in that it caused people to stop spending money on a whole set of consumer goods in order to buy iPads. It must be terrific, I thought. 

After I got my iPad I asked myself the question, what can you do with an iPad? One thing you can't do is type words. The touchscreen keyboard is very sensitive. Too sensitive. It's for typing one letter at a time like a retarded person. Anyone who "touch types" can forget about typing on an Ipad. The screen will drive you insane. I am typing this on my Ipad now but with a bluetooth keyboard I bought for $90 that, along with the leather pouch it comes in, makes it almost as heavy as a laptop. An Air laptop might even be lighter. And the typing even on this small keyboard is still sucking big time. Especially the shift key for the right hand. I can't find that motherfucker for anything. I'm always hitting the arrow keys and sending the goddamn cursor flying all over the place.

Touch screen technology seems cool, the way you can pinch and zip with your finger, but in practice it's not. Whenever the light hits the screen the wrong way I can see all the oily finger smudges and that disgusts me. It makes me want to wipe Purell all over it. And I’m not a particularly anal person or anything, it just bothers me. So I bought a stylus for $30 which is like a pen with a fat clitoris-like rubber tip. It’s spongy and fat like a chicken drumstick and unlike a Wacom tablet it’s not pressure sensitive, nor is the iPad very responsive to it. Wacom does offer a stylus for the iPad but right now it takes about six weeks to get one and they cost $30. The apps, Brushes, and Layers, are supposedly the best for drawing. I’ve tried them both. You can’t draw for shit on an iPad.

I should also mention that Elements, the app that is supposed to be the best for writing is buggy. Sometimes it fails to register your big greasy finger when you’re trying to plant a cursor on the page or when you try to hit the various commands. Also, Elements has a folder system, but as far as I can tell you can only rename folders you can’t delete them. So the whole idea that the app is useful in managing your text files is ridiculous. You end up with files and folders all over the place in no time.

Finally, the reason that this review is so lame is that I'm typing it on my iPad and the iPad makes you stupid. If you have any ideas of apps that will make me change my mind, please help!

Movies and books: I’m reading The Boy who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, that somebody gave me. It makes me feel that if that writer could finish a novel and get it published that I certainly should be able to. We watched Bring Me the Head of Alberto Garcia, directed by Sam Peckinpah. It reminded me of the old Monty Python knock offs of Peckinpah movies so I kept laughing uncontrollably through all the ultra-violent scenes. We also went camping at the Del Valle reservoir with Oscar’s cub scout troop. My nose ran like a faucet, my eyes puffed out, and my head swelled up like a cantaloupe from all the pollen.