Vintage Prom Photo

Isn't that just adorable? A poor man's Steve Jobs got to take Alice in Wonderland to his senior prom. When you think about what they probably look like now, it seems criminal. Thank you, Father Time!

"You're welcome!"

These two freshly-scrubbed kids seem a bit young to be wearing these kinds of clothes, but when you look at their faces for long enough (no less than fourteen hours), they seem totally comfortable in them, as if they were born to be adults. It's impressive.

This couple looks right out of Saturday Night Fever and I love it--despite the fact that it's tinged with sadness, as her corsage is an embarrassment and that always ruins a night on the town.

These next two nightowls have got to be from the South and, with that in mind, this photo is not only inadvertently hilarious but also could have been taken anywhere from 1950-2010.

But this is by far the most surprising thing I saw on my recent tour of the internet:

Fourteen results? That just doesn't seem right.

Hopefully, I've been able to change things with this missive, get things back on the right track--to right what once went wrong, you might say. I'll have to try it again and see what happens.


DEVELOPING...

Update:

More. In less time. It worked; I don't know how, but it worked...

_

I Can See the Future

And in that future, some punk 5th grader will point his iPhone at the smart kid and an alarm will sound:

Nerd-alert! Nerd-alert!

The smart, awkward kid will turn red in the face. If he's lucky the teacher will come over to intervene, but the punk will immediately shift the blame.

"What? I didn't say it--Google Goggles did! And it's never wrong!"

Of course, it will be a customized Google Goggles, with various messages attached to pictures the punk takes of everybody he knows ("Well, Miranda, I don't know what to tell you, but it says you're the girl who's going to blow me in the back of the bus today..."), but the teacher doesn't need to know that.

What is Google Goggles, you ask? Well, it is this:

The world, like the World Wide Web before it, is about to be hyperlinked. Soon, you may be able to find information about almost any physical object with the click of a smartphone.

This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.

How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.

Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.

(courtesy NYTimes.com)

Although I can certainly see benefits to this application/database, if used to augment a normal education/existence, there is also something disconcerting about it.

Thanks to word processors, hardly anybody knows how to spell these days. Thanks to cell phones, nobody remembers phone numbers or even writes them down. Thanks to GPS, most people have no idea where they are going in their own hometown.

In a few more generations of smart phones, or at least in a few more generations of users, many people will have in their pockets a consistent excuse to never know anything, to retain nothing, to depend on their phone as a replacement brain.

Are we becoming too dependent on technology? Will some evil mastermind slowly fuck over humanity by hacking into the Google database and subtly creating an alternate reality, biding his time before shutting down our outsourced brain and taking over a new world populated by blithering idiots suddenly unable to navigate their own subdivision, call each other, or differentiate between an orange and a hand grenade? Will people in the future see reality like the Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, but none of it will make any sense?

I'd like to say that this is an absurd notion--in league with my daydream that some deviously clever Luddite is behind the emergence of fully-keyless automobiles, as part of a brilliant plan to freeze them all in place one fateful day and show us the error of our ways-- but the annals of history overfloweth with reasons to be wary of evil men bent on world domination, the consolidation of information, and over-dependence on technology.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Meanwhile, I grow more uncomfortable with the realities made possible by the clever and efficient folks at Google.

_

STOP--Statistics Time

GTC HQ, before the new paint job

We here at Goodtime Charlie HQ are proud to share with you, our loyal readers, the fact that we have reached a new milestone--this month there have been over 1500 unique visitors to the site, despite the fact that we never advertise.

We are also proud to say that we remain advertising-free, to the continuing detriment of our bottom line. Not only is it easier to look ourselves in the mirror this way, but we also can't imagine anyone who might want to advertise here, considering the dangerous content, from a boredom/PR standpoint, we say with puffed chests, as if we amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.


Regardless of all that mumbo-jumbo, here are some more fun audience statistics, courtesy of Dr. Goodtime:

- The most readers on a single day was 110 on 12/09/09

- Readers come from 76 countries, including one dangerous dude in Iran, who my sources tell me actually steals an internet connection using a sharpened toothbrush pointed SSE, down in his unmarked cell in the middle of the desert, down where we will never find him.

- Much like the red state/blue state map, oddly, most readers in the United States live in California, New York, and Illinois

- Not one person in West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, or Delaware has checked in this month

- The most popular article this month is the Michael Jackson one, which has been viewed by 258 people.

- The most popular month was December, 2008, which, upon recent review, was a pretty awesome month.

- 65% of readers used Firefox as their browser (nerd alert!)

- The only phrases people have typed into Google that resulted in my blog being first on the list are:

- goodtime charlie nothing is sacred (duh-Ed.)
- "real dolls" "face fuck"
- joan rivers is so old
- how people want to escape the present
- 10 stages of romance
- private torture and rape clubs

Well, statistics class is over, students--thank you for reading and please remember to bring me shiny red apples stuffed with gold coins tomorrow morning or you'll all get caned and peed on.

_

AOL Not Done Hemorrhaging Money Quite Yet

AOL--once worth $164 billion only nine years ago when they bought Time Warner--is now worth a relatively meager $5.7 billion, loses 200,000 subscribers a month, and is getting unceremoniously kicked out of the Time Warner fold on December 9th, six years after the AOL was dropped from AOL Time Warner after a $99 billion loss in one year.

Despite the fact that things have only been looking down for AOL, they assure you they are still relevant.

Seriously! Just because everybody who has an AOL account is over the age of 45 and thinks AOL is the internet does not mean they can't compete with Google. I mean...they just have so many unique products to offer...like...uhm...web advertising and stuff.

Aware they needed a massive directional shift, they recently brought in a former Google executive to turn things around, handed out millions to Madison Avenue ad/research firms, and decided that on December 9th their new logo will look like this:

What more could they possibly need, right? Careful not to blink--you might miss their instant, meteoric rise to the top of the technology industry.

In case you are an idiot and don't get it, let the overpaid AOL peeps explain:

"The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

The constantly changing images behind the logo are also intended to elicit surprise, said Ms. Wilson and Jordan Crane, creative director at Wolff Olins New York.

“It’s a mix of do-it-yourself and high production values, crazy stuff and elegant stuff,” Mr. Crane said, “simple and engaging and bizarre — all the things the Internet is.”

(courtesy NYTimes.com)

Man, do those folks at Leo Burnett, Wolff Olins, and AOL know how to milk money out of a dying cow! Maybe they would do a more thorough, effective job if their salaries actually depended on the performance of the company?

But what do I know--I'm (sadly?) not in the bullshit business and I didn't lose $16 billion in the first three months of this year...I got no cred!

_

Why Did This Take So Long?

A new, rival PC operating system is finally in the works, courtesy of Google, whose desire to take over the world will once again make it better. For now...

Did nobody else think they could make a better operating system than noted dinosaur Windows? Really? It can't be that hard--just rip off most of your ideas from Apple, throw in some user-unfriendliness, and voila!

Now can somebody release a secret video of Bill Gates dropping F-bombs while filling his pants please?

_