You've probably heard about this mysterious capacity of the iPhone to track your every movement, record the data, store it and then upload it into your computer whenever you "sync up" through iTunes or whatever. Presumably then the data, reflecting the GPS coordinates of everywhere you've been, can piggy-back through file-sharing and wind up on the hard drives of millions of complete strangers who will then have, as Major Strasser said to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," a complete dossier on you. Only in this instance, you will not receive the Major's smarmy reassurance, "Don't worry, we're not going to broadcast it," because in the age of Facebook and Twitter you can guarantee the data will be everywhere faster than you can say Kim Kardashian.
Once I read about this, I stopped taking my iPhone everywhere. Who needs to pack a snitch where your cell phone should be? "Hey, aren't you forgetting something?" the iPhone says in simulated electronic speech as I head out the door. "Oh, just going to the store," I say (wink wink).
It turns out another app running in background can also record events from the future and download them onto your iPhone. Either that, or I'm making this whole thing up as a premise for a blog post. My iPhone, for example, in a very timely move given what I've been writing about lately, just provided me with the transcript of President Donald Trump's first press conference held in January, 2013, the day after his Inauguration. Here it is:
President The Donald (PTD):
Hello journalists. As the warm-up man just told you during his opening routine, I expect this to be a good show and the kickoff for a major presidency. I expect your cooperation in making this happen. Everything I've done in my life has been top-shelf and a very major, successful enterprise, and I expect this presidency to be no different. I won't tolerate mediocrity or anybody giving it less than one hundred percent. You've been warned. So let's start the questions with a major journalist, no second bananas. Where's that Gregory guy, who gets a lot of network time?
David Gregory: President Trump, and let me say how good it sounds to say that...
PTD: No brown nosing, Gregory.
Gregory: Right. How are things proceeding on your cabinet selections?
PTD: Right now we're looking at onyx for the White House kitchen, with gold door pulls...
Gregory: No, I mean State, Defense, Attorney General, like that.
PTD: Sure. Well, for one thing, you can bet that each appointment will be a major figure, someone who's absolute tops in their field. I won't tolerate someone who doesn't have what it takes to really excel. I want tens, major, major successess. I would think of it in the same way as my dating years, when the women were absolutely gorgeous, tens everyone of them, no eights or even nines, just knock-outs and major lookers. I'm looking for the same type of quality in my cabinet appointments, not so much the looks part but the major excellence part. This is going to be a major presidency and fall in line with everything I've ever done, which is top-shelf. The American people deserve no less. Who's next? Chris Matthews? Go ahead.
Matthews: Wow, I'm getting that tingle up my leg again just thinking about a celebrity of your stature actually in the Oval Office. This is huge.
PTD: Thanks, Chris. It feels good to be here, to get this show moving. I want another hit. Every show I've been involved with has hit big and this presidency will be no different. It will be a major success. My businesses are all doing fantastically, I'm really, really rich and a tremendously successful human being. I'm a major player.
Matthews: One slight criticism that I'm hearing is that some people feel you're making the office of the Presidency a little too much about you. Do you think that's fair?
PTD: I don't and I'll tell you why. During the transition period, when I unveiled my plan to redo the Capitol dome in onyx and gold, to match the Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, I heard a lot of this kind of sniping. The onyx design is part of who I am, I really like onyx and I want onyx for the American people. It isn't just about me, unless you think that only an extremely rich, very successful, top player such as myself deserves to use tremendous amounts of onyx in designing buildings and not the American people. And that's not who I am, and those aren't my values.
Thank you very much. I've got to break now. I've got some very major meetings with some top individuals about some huge matters. Keep up the good work and I'll convene another meeting soon to go over some other stuff I want you to be working on.
(End of transcript.)
The video embedded below, along with the draft script and supporting links,
can be freely viewed on the Nature Bats Last Substack account. Comments are
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