Multi-Touch Madness

My brother recently bought one of them newfangled iPhones. For a while he couldn't stop yammering on about its revolutionary features, like lack of SMS and no camera. One of the selling points of the iPhone is the multi-touch feature which, capacitive touch-sensing geek-rhetoric aside, basically allows you to control the device by touching the screen. The oh-so-special part is that you can touch more than one spot at a time, pinching, spreading, rotating, etc -- sounds like college -- and the device interprets these gestures in an intuitive and seamless -- and purely platonic -- way. My complaint -- that this feature might go unappreciated by someone whose fingertips have been turned to little wooden blocks -- fell on deaf ears.

And since this revolutionary innovation in user experience was first extruded from the spit-shined anus of Cupertino's darling of the corporate suck-fest (stock symbol: AAPL), every cell-phone, MP3-player, and in-dash DVD-player manufacturer in the world has copied "creatively adapted" the thing whole-cloth. To be fair, most of them are going "touch-sensitive", rather than "multi-touch", and hoping this distinction will be lost on the techno-addicted consumers of chromed turds that comprise the majority of their markets.

The latest in line to fellate the status quo is Siemens. Strangely, they've forgone the creation of yet another touch-sensitive phone-thing in favor of a touch sensitive stove top. A touch. Sensitive. Fucking. Stove top.

It reminded me of last summer. I was suffering through a week or so of horrible hay-fever type allergies, and thought some Sudafed might help me through the pain (or at least dull my senses enough to not care). Reading through the directions, I was surprised to find, among the list of possible side effects, nasal congestion. Nasal congestion.

It's like the entire commercial world has been tied up, sat down, and smacked brutally about the head and shoulders with a baseball bat made of frozen stupid.