The Gambler

The New Awful: Internet Explorer

Every once in a while, an ad as bad as this will bring me out of my blogging coma to post it so you all can cringe with me. Here, Internet Explorer attempts to be funny, ironic and self-deprecating - and fails.How can you miss with the always hilarious go-to: guy getting tackled from offscreen! How about cats! Everyone loves cats! CUPCAKES? HELP! WE SUCK AND WE KNOW IT! 



The creators of this are so sure that it sucks, they have disabled comments on the video over at YouTube.

Making matters worse, a companion website, TheBrowswerYouLovedToHate.com attempts to upsell the clued-in hipness with more than enough tongue-in-cheek desperation.

Why won't this work? Regardless of how much better IE9 is than previous iterations, people make up their minds on these things and they stay there. When you have a reputation for sucking, people don't forget that.

Books Where You Actually Turned the Pages Made from Real Paper

I was looking around for something to read, bored out of my mind by some Sinclair Lewis novel I downloaded for free from the Gutenberg Project, when I noticed that someone in the house had removed an old Time-Life book from the bookshelf in the dining room so they might employ it as a mousepad for some murderous game played on a laptop while sitting on the couch eating Goldfish and watching Family Guy. That's the level of respect we have for books these days, They're mousepads. These old Time-Life books, a series called "The Old West", belonged to my wife's father, and they've done nothing but collect dust since the turn of the century and well before that, I'm sure. And it was not with purposeful disrespect that the person in question decided it made a good mousepad, but a careful study of its smooth, leather-ish exterior determined it had the right reflective properties and gripping strength to be used for something. What are those stupid decorations in the dining room all about? The things with the paper inside them that look like perfect laptop mousepads?

And now I'm reading them. I feel like I'm getting the quality middle-school education I carelessly neglected all those years ago, too concerned was I with skipping class and trying to make girls pay attention to me. And the books are full of pictures, too, which is perfect for a wandering mind like mine. Here's the commercial that advertised this expensive set of volumes when it was newish.

Thank you, spoiled 21st Century child who thought this made the perfect mousepad for your gaming pleasure. Alas, I was just like you when I was your age, and never would've thought these books were good for anything, unless someone had told me they had pictures of naked Native Americans in them.