Emoticons are stupid, and here's why

I hate emoticons. I think they are dumb, they are lazy, and they are completely misused. It is very irritating when people on the internet pepper almost all of their sentences with little smiley faces and winks and the one with the dude's tongue sticking out. My limited comprehension skills allow me to decipher only the most basic iterations of these devilish tools, and I become willfully blind to anything with tildes and big O's and little o's.

Pearls before swine, one of my favorite comic strips, captured my emotions about emoticons quite effectively:

Google+ and much ado about nothing

Google recently unveiled its own version of facebook, called Google plus. News organizations, always on the lookout for something sensational, touted this as the new facebook with better privacy options. As with all of its previous products, Google made this one invite-only. In any case, I have no interest whatsoever in ever using this newfangled contraption. Maintaining one social network is hard enough for me; I have no appetite or patience for another. In fact, I am seriously considering completely deleting everything on my facebook and leaving it for good. Even though I don't even use it that much, it is a huge distraction and a time sink. Maybe returning to email and phone will be good.

Google's new product raises a few questions, however. Why this irrepressible urge to one-up the other guy? Why are these tech companies in perpetual race against one other? I understand that innovation is key to growth (and ultimately profits), but sometimes you have to recognize a lost cause and concede. Apple has got the personal music player market pretty well covered, and Microsoft had to learn it the hard way. Google has so perfected the art of online search that it is foolish to spend money in R&D to come up with newer engines (I'm looking at you Bing). Similarly, facebook has a virtual monopoly on social networking in the cloud (600 million users and counting). Any new product designed to rival it has a very high chance of failing spectacularly.

But but isn't facebook the new myspace? Didn't myspace suffer a similar sad demise? Well, yes and no. Myspace arrived at a time when net users were still confused about their needs. It failed to offer complete protection against fake profiles and predatory behavior. It is not like facebook is much better in that regard, but facebook arrived with a sense of purpose. Its exclusivity (remember when you needed to have a college email address AND have someone from inside the network approve you to join? If you can't, you are too young) was a big part of its appeal. People trust it enough to post pictures of their lives and spend time searching for high school classmates, birth mothers and old flames. Just like youtube will never be dislodged from its perch, facebook is here to stay. Whether we like it or not.

Google plus, like its confused predecessor Google Wave, will be a minor player in netdom. Like the old bard said, much ado about nothing. More like google minus.

WTF pictures! - 1

Every so often, in our routine and exceedingly boring lives, we chance upon scenes of such horrendous proportions that our delicate senses are severely offended and temporarily depart in due haste.

Where does this leave us? At a stupendous loss, of course. Some of us stand there, gaping stupidly at the thoughtless culprit, that sore sight for our eyes. Others? Well, they post it on their insignificant blogs.

Fortify your senses. Throw in enough canned food to last a platoon. Fasten your seat-belts.

Presenting the first installment of this ambitious, occasional series "WTF Pictures!":

At my local Barnes and Noble

 WTF?! This is a genre now? These books dare rest in the same store as Kant, Mamet and Frost? If this is what's going to save the dying publishing/reading industry, may as well let the whole thing die out.

Allow me to reply to this hideousness with another picture, this one courtesy of the internetz:

Wait, wait, wait. I feel like that's not enough. How about this?

Or better yet:

Get trippy!

Ever feel a strong, insatiable urge to go on a "trip"? The kind that ageless rock singers, aspiring screechers and just plain old bums keep boasting about all the time?

Are you, like me, not interested in taking drugs to get there?

Well fear no more.

1.Simply go to neave.com.

2. Click get trippy.

3. Boom! For 10 seconds, you too will see Lucy in the sky with diamonds (and who knows what else).

Completely legit site made by some graphics nerd. I mean the site's motto is "Like dropping acid, but not" - how benign is that?

And as always, we at UG remind you to be safe not to try this if you suffer from epilepsy of any kind.