It takes talent to step on your own dick without getting out of the car.
Herself is a huge fan of the original “Arthur” flick, the one starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli.
Me, I can take it or leave it, but I must admit that the thing is chock-full of quotable quotes. Pretty much any line delivered by Sir John Gielgud is a keeper.
But you have to know your audience when you cite a 41-year-old flick about a wealthy rumpot, horndog, and all-round dilettante — as Tony “The Blevinator” Blevins learned when he riffed on an Arthurism for a TikTok creator.
TikToker Daniel Mac spotted Blevins — Apple’s hard-charging vice president for procurement — in a high-zoot Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren at a California car show, and asked Blevins what he did for a living.
“I have rich cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women, but I take weekends and major holidays off.”
Oof. What Arthur said was:
“I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women, But! I have weekends off, and I am my own boss.”
Frankly, it wasn’t that funny in 1981. And The Bloviator’s updated take on it really fell flat at Apple, which showed Blevins the door. And not to his McLaren, either. Turns out he was not his own boss.
A tip of the hat to MacRumors, which is where I first saw the story.
Progress marches on, towing me along behind it like a water skier who refuses to leave shore. You can practically hear the skis dragging across the lakeside gravel.
I’ve been noticing various hitches in the gitalong of my 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro, which is the workhorse here at El Rancho Pendejo (“Your Gateway to Giggle City!”).
And as usual, the problem lies not with me, but with everybody else.
WordPress, The Washington Post, Esquire, and other stops along my daily dawdle all have been pissing on me from their considerable technological height, proclaiming that the MacBook’s 5-year-old OS (High Sierra, 10.13.6) and equally antiquated browser (Safari 13.1.2) are so 15 minutes ago, which as sayings go is likewise about as au courant as “Twenty-three skiddoo!”
It finally became so irksome that I felt compelled to take hold. WaPo and Chazbo Pierce’s site had both gotten as creaky as a geezer’s knees in February. And WordPress wouldn’t even let me swap headers on the blog, which is pretty basic stuff.
In a support chat I could sense the Happiness Engineer’s forehead bouncing rhythmically off the keyboard.
“Safari 13 is several versions behind the latest versions so I suspect that may be what is causing the issue,” s/he typed. “I would recommend that you try to access the site through a different browser such as Chrome if you’re not ready or able to update the Macs yet for whatever reason.”
Well, sheeyit. High Sierra is as good as it gets around here, Scooter. It’s on everything newer than mid-2012. And Google is evil no matter what they claim to be.
Still, it is winter, and I am retired, and also slightly bored. So I decided to do a little tinkering.
Not on the Main Machine, mind you. My testing bench would be the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro, the ’Book I use for road trips if I’m sleeping indoors. The 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air gets the callup if I’m tenting it.
First I paid a visit to my old buddy Mozilla, and hey presto, Firefox 96.0.3 works like a charm. But Firefox is awful needy — “Can I be your default browser? Please? Pleasepleaseplease?” — so I thought what the hell, let’s just bump the OS up a notch, see what happens. Can’t sing, can’t dance, too fat to fly.
I’ve been hinky about this shit ever since a long jump from Snow Leopard to Mavericks gave my 2009 iMac a brain bleed. But High Sierra to Mojave is only one little hop, just a year between releases. So I gave the boot drive a once-over with Disk Utility, downloaded a fresh copy of Mojave, and let ’er buck.
And so far, so good (knocking on wood). The 13-incher is my kitchen Mac when I’m not on the road, because I don’t like sitting down first thing, and anyway I have coffee to brew, breakfast to make. And as you see, all is smooth like Irish butter on homemade bread.
When I was a greedy and impatient young pup my parents granted the opening of one present each on Christmas Eve.
Now I’m a grizzled old mutt and there is just one present under the tree, period. And it’s for the both of us, Your Humble Narrator and Herself.
Opening it this evening seems silly, especially since we already know what’s inside: an Apple TV HD. It is to replace our Apple TV (3rd generation), which no longer pulls down HBO Now, Now having been rechristened Max, as in Mad, which I am.
We generally enjoy an hour of TV with our dinner. But should there be anything worth watching on HBO Max, which lately seems as unlikely as finding a sense of honor and duty in government, we have to bypass our old Apple TV — though, oddly, it seems to work just fine with everything save HBO Max (happy holidays, AT&T, you miserable pricks).
Dig that crazy midget Xmas tree, daddy-o. And the cool wrapping on the lone gift.
The workaround involves booting up the even older Mac Mini, lighting a candle to the shade of Steve Jobs, chanting our Video Mantra (“TV Input, HDMI-1, Receiver Input, AV-1”), switching inputs on both TV and receiver, launching a browser (Which one? I never remember), and finally shrieking, “Goddamnit all to hell anyway!” and running right back to the loving tentacles of Netflix, sister of Cthulhu.
Tomorrow we will have the new Apple TV, so, yay, etc. Herself’s gift will be watching it. Mine will be setting it up.
This is less enthralling than it might have been long ago, in the Before Time. After 30 years of providing my own tech support for personal and professional gadgetry I’m having trouble working up any enthusiasm for wrangling a new comosellama just in case HBO, against all odds, comes up with another “The Sopranos,” “High Maintenance,” or “The Wire.”
I’m for sure not holding my breath while waiting for a new George Carlin special. Neither is George.
Who might ask: Is newer always better?
When it comes to bicycles I’m much more interested in friction shifting, rim brakes, and the nine-speed drivetrain than I am in the latest shiny object making the registers ring, when customers and product can be found in the same place at the same time.
I have an Apple Pencil for my iPad Pro, but when I sat down yesterday to draw a holiday card for the neighbors, I used my old analog A.W. Faber 3H pencil, a fistful of Sakura Pigma Micron pens, and a sheet of Strathmore 300 Series Bristol paper. And yes, the card was in good old black and white. (I thought of making a quick trip to the art-supply store for colored pencils, and then I thought again.)
Speaking of iPads, there’s a metric shit-ton of e-books on mine, but I notice I’m mostly reading real books lately. The kind you don’t have to plug into the wall.
This is just the yelping of an old dog who’s tired of learning new tricks, pining for a day when he not only didn’t have to keep stuff running, he didn’t even have to buy the stuff. It just sorta, like, grew there, under the tree.
But time passes and things change.
“Nothing endures but change,” as Heraclitus observed.
Izzat so? Well, spare me the change, you one-scroll wonder. And gimme some George, goddamnit. I already got too much stuff.
Rarely do the multinational corporations come in for praise here at Ye Olde Chuckle Hut.
They routinely claim to stand behind what they sell, but often can be found standing directly behind the customer, wearing a predatory expression and not much else. Just who exactly is the “end user” here?
That being said, here’s a tip of the Mad Dog sombrero to the support folks at Apple. They got right on the twitchy 2014 MacBook Pro I sent them, found a fault in addition to the one that I had diagnosed, repaired both, and shipped the sucker back with alacrity. Saturday delivery, before noon. Booyah, etc.
There was one small hitch in the gitalong, and in the end (har de har har) it proved to be no hitch at all.
When support notified me via text of the second fault and asked permission to fix it (for an additional three hundy and change) I was unable to approve the additional work online, either via Mac OS or iOS. Couldn’t get an active link on the “Git ’er done” page. God damn it all anyway, etc.
So I rang ’em up. Mind you, this was on Tuesday last, when the product barkers were pitching the brand-new iPhone 12 to the rubes. Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry! I was expecting a long wait and a short reply that proposed my going and doing something to myself of which I would not approve.
Nope. My call was answered promptly, the support person kicked me to his supervisor, and she sez to me she sez, “Lemme handle that for you.” Including covering the additional cost.
Frankly, I was dumbfounded. The tab was not unreasonable, a whole lot less than buying a new MacBook Pro, and I was prepared to pay it. But all I had to spend beyond the initial repair estimate was a simple thank-you for the generosity.
“Yeah, you gotta lotta Apple product, been with us a long time,” she replied cheerily. Right on both counts, with everything from iPods to iPhones to iPads, MacBooks to Minis, PowerBooks to PowerMacs, going all the way back to 1990 and that first Mac SE.
Frankly, the only way the experience could’ve been improved is if they’d given me a loaner to drive while my MacBook was in the shop.
“Here, take the keys to this 16-inch 2.3GHz 8-core MacBook Pro with the 16GB of memory and the 1TB SSD, take ’er for a little spin while we work on the auld fella here.”
I guess they figured I didn’t need the bait. I’ve been on the hook for 30 years.
The Granite Face on the Whitewash Trail is no place for an elderly fella with a dodgy ankle. But I’ll probably hike up the sonofabitch anyway.
Once I saw a young man yell “look” in the lobby and let his prick hang out; he closed his overcoat then and tried to run out the door, rather swirled clumsily in the revolving door. One woman screamed but most people shrugged. Depressing. He needed help. A lock on his zipper for beginners. — Jim Harrison, “Wolf.”
Faced with the ceaseless weenie-wagging that constitutes our national politics it’s easy to forget that the world remains a remarkable place.
Yesterday during a brief hike in the Sandia foothills my iPhone hooted. It was a text from Apple advising me that it had received my MacBook Pro, shipped the previous day, and that the agreed-upon repairs would commence directly.
It was not that long ago that I would have had to wait until I got home and checked the answering machine to see whether the typewriter repairman had gotten around to my Royal manual yet.
Of course, my hip pocket was a quieter place back then, what with no mobile phone and a wallet that bordered on the anorexic; no matter how I stuffed it with money it always vomited it up somewhere.
And if I’d wanted to snap any photos during the hikes I was mostly not taking I would’ve had to pack along the Pentax MX camera I had acquired in a trade with an iffy acquaintance. I got the camera, some cash, and a bit of the old nose whiskey, and he got my S&W .41 Magnum (I was slightly overgunned at the time).
Later this gent would draw a short stretch at Club Fed in Texas, not far from where Apple is resolving the shortcomings of my MacBook. Not for anything involving the .41 Mag, or me, happily. Last I heard he had become a respectable citizen and taxpayer, a credit to society, just like Your Humble Narrator.
Time passes, and things change. For instance, it was probably fortunate for me that I shipped my MacBook in when I did. Just this morning MacRumors noted that this mid-2014 edition of the venerable 15-inch laptop will be added to Apple’s list of vintage and obsolete products come Halloween.
The 13-inch model I’m using to create this post is already on the list, as are all the other Macs in the house, save the iPhones and iPads. The 2014 MacBook Pros are supposed to remain eligible for service indefinitely, says MacRumors … “subject to parts availability.”
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