And then I went home.
Fri Oct 11 2002 09:06:
Report on the Dave Eggers reading: Dave read some pirate stories from 826 Valencia, a couple bits of You Shall Know Our Velocity, and a bit from A Heartbreaking Work.... My favorite was the pirate stories, partly because of their Markov Chain ridiculousness, but also because Dave read them in his normal voice (pausing occasionally to put his head down between his arms in mock shame, laughing at some particularly ridiculous passage). The other readings were delivered in a plaintive voice which grated on me. The audience asked Dave weighty questions about literature and politics that he had trouble answering. At the signing, he was very friendly and talkative.
"And then? And then?...?!
One time I was 100% wrong and I remain defiant. I refer to Dippin'
Dots. Dippin' Dots is an ice cream-like substance which comes in tiny
pebble-sized spheres. You eat it with a spoon like real ice
cream. It's advertised as "The Ice Cream Of The Future".
I first encountered Dippin' Dots in my senior year of high
school. They set up a little stand in a Bakersfield mall. I tried some once and it was nothing special. It wasn't as good as actual ice
cream, it was gimmicky in an annoying Jetsons/dystopian cyberpunk
future way, it had no facility for Ben and Jerry-style interosculation of tasty non-ice cream items, etc. etc. Despite all these flaws it seemed to actually believe that it was the Ice Cream Of The Future, when I saw it pretty clearly as being the Won't Go Anywhere Manufactured Fad Of The Mid-'90s.
However, I was wrong. Dead wrong. Dippin' Dots has survived; nay, it has prospered. Dippin' Dots is now being sold at McDonald's! I can only hope that the novelty can still wear off, that my perception of Dippin' Dots longetivity is due to my having been part of the very early test market for it. Otherwise... well, it's not really that big a deal. It just bugs me.
The other thing that bugs me (but pertaining to which I never had incorrect premonitions of market failure) is those drinks with huge blobs of tapioca-derived substance living on the bottom of the cup. I think there's something about little balls of food that rubs me the wrong way.
Fri Oct 11 2002 19:55:
Sometimes I think: "That's so stupid; it'll never catch on!" (or,
sometimes, "That's so stupid, it'll never catch on!") Most of the time I have been correct about this, and when this happens I gloat
silently. One time I was 100% wrong and appropriately humbled: I used to think it was a really stupid idea to launch applications from a
desktop with one click instead of a double-click. It turns out that
double-click was unneccessary UI clutter, and now I use single-click
application launch all the time and it seems like the natural way to
do things.
