"the future always sucks" while praising the pleasures of a pay-as-you-go cell phone that fits in your pocket is pretty funny for those of us who remember dial phones.

That was the future once, you know. In fact, it was the future for all of recorded history until just a few years ago, relatively speaking.

I used to use a cheap pay-as-you go cell phone also, I found it worked very well, especially if you divide your time between countries, you don't have to pay every month, just for what you use.

Now I found I was willing to get my first subscription, two entire long years, so I could have an iPhone. Haven't regretted it for a moment. Amazing machine.

I tried a Blackberry once, yeah the physical keys made typing a little bit quicker but not nearly enough to make me wish I had one of those instead, especially considering everything that it didn't do that the iPhone does. Typing is a pretty small part of what I do on it, all things considered. There are tricks that help with that too, apps and techniques, but anyone can find those with a little looking.

Or you can just complain about the future. One thing I can confidently predict: It won't care. It comes anyway. It also won't notice when you start praising it as "the glorious past". That's just the way the future is. Haughty. Indifferent. That's always a maddening but attractive trait.

For what it's worth: it does get easier.

I had all the same experiences when I first got the iPhone. It seemed to improve a bit over the first days, but not massively. I just figured I'd live with it.

Then the other day I typed something and I realized that I was typing pretty much normally, quickly, and it was all coming out fine.

It takes a month or two. Not worth it for everyone I guess. But it does improve, is my point, and it takes some practice.

On the other side of things, the right has been dying for a way to turn the piracy story into proof that Obama is a miserable failure.

The ridiculous inflation of this into a "major" military anything for Obama is just part of the absurd right wing noise machine still dictating so much of even mainstream coverage (let alone the true fringe insane ones like Glenn Beck).

Someone on cable news was pontificating that it was the moment that defined Obama's Presidency, because Carter ordering the rescue mission that failed when two helicopters collided was what doomed Carter's to being seen as a failure.

Yeah, that's logical.

The idiot news media decides that random acts out of the President's control are actually anything meaningful in terms of their abilities or competence (had the pirates decided to fire two seconds before the commander ordered the snipers to go, then that would reverse the whole thing and prove that Obama was utterly inept? Right) and then points to their absurd inflating of this as evidence that it's so.

"Since we judged Carter on this meaningless "symbolic" event, then we obviously will with this Presidency also. Therefore, it's what defines him"

Roundabout we go.

One of the most depressing aspects of this among many is that among the most extreme and hysterical voices Juan Cole cites is a writer right here at Salon, pushing the most ridiculously knee-jerk and inflated hyperbole straight out of right wing radio land, which she admits to listening to "all day long".

Yay Salon. Good going. One of the most insidiously vapid, fear-and false-scandal-mongering idiots on the right, and she's presented right here with defenders insisting that she's a "liberal" writer.

Cole's quick, apt description of Obama "leaning into a double-handed handshake" was exactly how this looked to me when I saw it, and the wingnuts getting out the measuring tapes and playing the clip over and over immediately made most non-wingers sigh in recognition. Here it goes again.

Does anyone really think that this is how you "bow" to a Royal figure, vigorously shaking his hand with both of yours as you do so, then immediately straightening up and smiling and joking with him?

What appalls me is how many here in Salon comments defend the wingnuttery, but then, that's what you get when you publish one of the worst, most sensationalist blowhards out there who's gleefully linked by Drudge every month.

One Hand

Dude, look at the goodamned video and the friggin' pic at the top of the article: One hand! He's shaking with one god-damned hand! Jesus, what are you people, blind?

He grasped the Saudi's hand with one hand, immediately followed by the other. That makes two. Watch the video yourself.

I can't believe we're even discussing this but just inventing things and being arrogant about them at the same time is exactly the problem being discussed in the article.

is descending into a caricature of itself, not even bothering to pretend that it's interested in anything except the most sensational, controversy-stirring fringe viewpoints, anything to get a good mud fight going.

Some people justify it on the grounds that Salon simply has to survive, and after all, by printing the idiotic stuff, that way they can pay actual writers to write about topics that matter.

I think it's more like the Jerry Springer show, sure, it brings in a lot of advertising money for a while, but eventually it collapses under the weight of its own cheap, crass meaniglessness and no one remembers it except as as a joke.