At the time, throwing rocks seemed like a good idea.
Kit and I were 13 years old. We had a tree house in the forest behind my subdivision, a fallen deer blind that we
converted into a war room for our exploration ops. Not too far from this was Devil’s Ridge, a 30 foot drop in the forest floor that led to all sorts of childhood mythos: that’s where ghosts were spotted, if you got too close to the edge you’d be pulled off by an unknown force, that once you went down you’d be unable to come back up. Being 13, imaginative and considerably stupid, we typically treated Devil’s Ridge with a special reverence, because nobody knew what went on deep in the forest.
Until the dirts came.
Back then, kids who smoked cigarettes, wore jeans jackets, rode minibikes and had actual biceps were called dirts. It was a derogatory term assigned primarily out of fear, because if a dirt got a hold of you, it was commonly accepted among non-dirts that he would kill and eat you. And you’d be alone in your suffering, because non-dirts would scamper away to their Atari 2600s and Micronauts before you could cry help.
On this particular summer day, four dirts were at the bottom of Devil’s Ridge, smoking cigarettes and talking about how they should tweak the carbs on their minibikes to get them to run leaner. They were strange creatures, bordering on Yeti-caliber mystery, right up until Kit had his big idea.
“We should throw rocks at them.”
To me, this was like attacking Russia with yarn and tinfoil. “Why?” I asked. “Are you insane?”
Always the quiet tactician, Kit calmly said, “We have the high ground. We could throw a bunch and then get out of here before they even know what’s going on.”
My critical thinking skills dissolved in the face of such blinding logic. I agreed with Kit’s plan and immediately forgot these kids had minibikes, a working knowledge of everything mechanical and enough testosterone coursing through their veins to wither any false bravado simply by stroking their surprisingly full beards.
Kit and I perched ourselves at one of the ridge’s outcroppings, each with about ten rocks the size of large hail. We counted to three, stood up, and chucked the rocks down on the horde of teenage cyborgs. The last thing I remember seeing is their heads immediately swiveling and focusing their targeting computers on us as the rocks left our hand. They saw us and we weren’t getting away with squat.
Quite literally, the next hour was spent running through a suburban woods trying to evade smallish murderers on minibikes. I still don’t know how in the space of 45 seconds they went from smoking cigarettes 30 feet below us to 10 feet behind us on wailing death machines. From that moment on, however, I had a newfound appreciation for the minibike; those things are dynamite.
The point of all of this is twofold: (1) don’t throw rocks at hormonally-advanced teenagers when you are in fact not one of them, and (2) if it weren’t for a lucky dive into a thicket, I would have been killed, stuffed and mounted by dirts and therefore wouldn’t be around to bring you the following links. Hooray, right?
- The HTC Hero is the first mobile phone to get Flash functionality in its browser, so how’s the performance? Maddening. (thx Daring Fireball)
- Unfortunate news for Microsoft: sales down 17% and after-tax profit down 29% versus a year ago. The PC sales slump has really taken its toll.
- Wired: How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans. I know a lot of people who fail on many of these.
- Apple owns 91% of the high-end ($1000+) computer market. This means that you can predict respectably well what sort of computer someone bought by the price they paid.
- Fast-food photo artists, your jobs are about to be commandeered by animation interns. (via kottke)
- LA Times: 61 essential postmodern reads, replete with an iconic legend to inform readers about each books’s postmodern trickery.
- If you plan on losing your wallet, make sure you have baby pictures in it if you want a clean shot of getting it back.
- A group of scientists at the University of Washington are working on a way to make electronic messages and documents “self-destruct” after a given period of time. Great idea, but it will quickly devolve into a cat-and-mouse game involving hacking the vanish code and having new code developed, etc. Think virus author vs. antivirus vendor, or heck, Palm Pre vs. iTunes syncing.
- Finally, Walter Cronkite’s lesson as it relates to authenticity and transparency.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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