MovableType 3.2 is out. Wait. Before you stampede off to log into TypeKey (or am I the only one here who actually uses MT?), you may want to consider the following:
Check out the front page of the MovableType site. The grinning Drew Barrymore lookalike on the lower right side of the screen–see her? It’s deceiving, isn’t it. You’re tempted to think, what a nice person, what a nice smile! Who couldn’t love the adorable pixie cuteness of a younger, drug-softened Drew Barrymore?
But look closer. It’s not Drew at all. There’s been some strange amalgamation of Drew and the imminently floatable Angelina Jolie. Or more precisely, those river barges tacked on her face that are sometimes called lips. And with the glasses of Ashley Judd, she’s three parts of a celebrity trio famed for beauty, if not acting skills.
But fitted together, she’s like those old celebrity clone images, the morphed “what would happen if so-and-so had a kid with such-and-so” photos. They always look slightly repulsive, a description I don’t usually apply to people. But technically, they aren’t people, they’re photo manipulations created by a computer morphing program to whet the humour buds of people who think fart jokes are funny.
Ah, but you say, this is an advertisement for Typepad, a different service from MovableType. Even barring the difference, Typepad is built on the MT interface and uses the same protocols. For all I know, Typepad is simply an automated, sleeker, more user-friendly MT. But, let’s call it a different product completely.
Scroll down.
Featured on the left hand column, hawking MT “threads”, is a monkey with a baseball cap. No, I’m sorry. It’s Joey, a guy I knew from fourth grade on who was tall and lanky and had stringy, Gollum-like hair that always looked as if it had been plastered to his forehead with undercarriage grease from a 1940 Buick. His head appeared to have been elongated to eggplant proportions, and his nose had been broken in a fight, so it puffed out enormous, as if it was attempting to consume his face.
Oh, I really shouldn’t be so mean-spirited. Joey was an interesting guy. He ran off to join the Peace Corps, but came back a year later. He never went back to school, and last I heard, he was working at a pulp and paper mill in my old hometown of Franklin. His sister Krystal had a crush on me and we danced together at senior prom. I’ll never forget that, because one of the biggest computer geeks was there–Andy–and he told me I couldn’t dance. Wow. Talk about your all-time humiliations, being slam dunked by a computer geek. I wasn’t a star athlete, and I wasn’t a geek, and I wasn’t a genius. I made very little impression on most people I met, and so I passed through high school like a ghost.
Joey was similar to me, thinking back. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and the ones he did have were outsiders. Like me, he sort of drifted through school, not doing poorly, but not doing as well as he could have. Joey was smart, but book learning wasn’t one of his gifts. He could fix cars though. I often saw him outside his house working on the engine of a Corvette that perpetually sat on cinderblocks in front of his house. He’d even work on it mornings, before school started.
I know for a fact that at least a few people from my old high school days read this site on a semi-regular basis, so I won’t do biopics on them…yet. Still, the days of yore sometimes rear their heads, a twinge of memory struck like ore in a mine, and flow until tapped. It’s always in’erestin’ to see what settles in the sieve.
“Look Ma! Gold!”
Fool’s Gold, maybe, but still, at least it’s shiny. And even monkeys love shiny things. One of these days, I’ll dig up an old elementary school photo of me in bowtie. I truly looked like a monkey (some would secretly, or not so secretly, say I still do). Something impish in that smile, made you wonder if I wasn’t about to throw some metaphorical feces at you or hand you a banana as a gift.
At this point, I have no idea what I’m writing about, so I’ll end before this post explodes from incoherency. Oh yeah, have a good weekend.