The Pathophysiology of Bob's Pizzeria

Two billion people use computers. Most of them are kind of like that aunt of yours who thinks the only way to turn off a computer is by unplugging it, and that half of the keys on a keyboard are just there for decoration, like parsley. And for some reason, almost all computer programs are made for people like Bill Gates, instead of people like your aunt. It's like the computer industry is saying, "You can always count on us to confuse the shit out of your aunt, and 1.5 billion other people." This all started in the 70s. Bill Gates thought, "I can't stand my Aunt Gina. I want to torture her. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make it so that everyone in the world uses a personal computer. But I'm not going to let any company make a program that's easy for Aunt Gina to use. That'll teach her not to give me socks for Christmas." This is all part of Bill Gates's feud with his Aunt Gina. The world doesn't care enough about making things easy to use. Just look at TVs. Companies have made them more and more confusing over time. TVs used to just be "plug it in, power on, power off, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down." But not anymore. Nowadays, using a TV involves a much different process. "You want to watch TV? Press Input. No--you're using the wrong remote. Get your TV remote, and press Input. Your TV remote. The one that says Sony--not the one that says Time Warner Cable. Get that remote, and press Input. But don't select TV to watch TV. Select HDMI 1 to watch TV. You want to watch Matlock? Press Menu and select Search. No--not on your TV remote. On your cable box remote. Oh--you want to watch a Matlock DVD? Press Input, and select HDMI 3. No--you're using the wrong remote. And the wrong TV. And you're in the wrong house. With the wrong family. Look around. Wrong TV, wrong family, wrong house. You have a Sony--not a Samsung, you have two boys--not three girls, you're married to a Jewish hairdresser--not a Puerto Rican yoga instructor, you live on Oak Street--not Oak Lane, and you live in Springfield, Missouri--not Springfield, Massachusetts. Holy shit you're lost! Put down all five remotes, go 1300 miles southwest, get your TV remote, press Input, select HDMI 3, get your Matlock DVD, go to your DVD player, press power and open, put your DVD in the player, close the player, sit down, take a sip of your beer, and press play. No--

you're using the wrong remote. You know what? Fuck Matlock. Go read a book or eat a piece of fruit." That's what watching TV is like nowadays. That's how lost some people get. They have five remotes and eight HDMIs, and have to call tech support and ask things like, "How do I turn on my TV?" Sometimes, the caller has a cable box remote, and the tech support guy tells him he needs to use the TV remote. And the TV remote is missing. He searches here and there, in this cabinet and that cabinet, under his couch, over his refrigerator, and he can't find it. His pregnant wife walks into the room and says, "Honey--I'm in labor," and he replies, "OK--go to the hospital. I'll meet you there after I find the TV remote." He's opening this, closing that, bending, turning, twisting, squatting, trying to track down that remote. He ends up so sweaty and out of breath, that it's like he's the one in labor. The tech support guy ends up coaching him on Lamaze breathing. "OK, sir. Breathe in, breathe out. Press Input while you're breathing in, and select HDMI 1 while you're breathing out." [Caller/ Customer:] "OK. I'm on HDMI 1." [Support:] "Alright. Now I want you to take your TV remote, your cable box remote, your DVD remote, and your Tivo remote, and pour milk all over them." [Customer:] "Whole milk or lowfat?" [Support:] "Sir--that depends. Is your Tivo HD compatible?" [Customer:] "I'm not sure." [Tech Support:] "Well in that case, you're going to need to do a purification ritual. Do you have any incense?" And nowadays, sometimes people have conversations like this: [Person 1:] "What did you do yesterday?" [Person 2:] "Well, I went to Santa Barbara with the wife. We saw that new Tom Hanks movie. We went rollerblading for an hour. And we ate some fresh halibut from that restaurant my cousin owns. What did you do yesterday?" [Person 1:] "Uh, well, I turned on my TV. It took about seven hours. And then I watched TV for five hours. And then my wife came home with a baby boy. We named him Matlock." Sometimes the internet is even more confusing than TVs and computer programs. Case in point: "Carpal tunnel syndrome is idiopathic median neuropathy at the carpal tunnel. The pathophysiology is not completely understood but can be considered compression of the median nerve traveling through the carpal tunnel."

That's the introduction in Wikipedia's article on carpal tunnel syndrome. In what universe is something like that an introduction to a topic? If there were a Wikipedia skydiving school, here's what they'd do to new students on day one: they'd slip them a roofie and make them unconscious, put a parachute on their back, blindfold them, fly them up 30,000 feet in Afghanistan, wait for them to regain consciousness, and then say, "This is your introduction to skydiving. We're going to throw you out of this fucking plane, and make you find your way back to America. And just to make things easy for you, we put a bus schedule and an Afghani-to-English dictionary in your pockets. Oh yeah. Don't forget to donate money to the Wikipedia Skydiving School. We rely on donations from people like you, asshole." I think Wikipedia's introduction to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is useless to everyone, except for one small group: people who've already studied Carpal Tunnel Syndrome for a thousand hours, and want to give themselves a final exam on it. "I'll read the first paragraph of that Wikipedia article--and if I understand it, I'll give myself a Master's degree in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from UCWI: The University of Confusing Wikipedia Intros." Some of Wikipedia's content is pretty confusing. But at least the site itself isn't confusing. Unlike Twitter. Twitter's a site that's mentioned a lot almost everywhere--but it's not something that many people actually use. For every ten people on Facebook, there's only one person on Twitter. And if you're not familiar with Twitter, it can be hard to figure out what it is. Imagine going there, and coming across Kim Kardashian's name and picture, and this text next to it: "Shortened Koko to kokes...she calls me Keeks now, short for Kiki... RT @KardashianNavy- I love Kim's nickname for Khloe! #kokes." If you don't know much about Twitter, you'll probably end up thinking that's some sort of code that means we're going to attack the British tomorrow at noon. "Are we going to do it by air or by sea? I better check Paul Revere's Twitter." Twitter is confusing--and it doesn't go out of its way to tell you what the site is and how to use it.

But at JerrySeinfeld.com, the top of every page has a link that says "What is this?" And that link takes you to a page that tells you everything you need to know about the site. That's the right way to do things. Jerry Seinfeld knows how to run a website. No one else does. We should make him the Mayor of Silicon Valley, and the CEO of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Microsoft. Within a few months, he'll make everything 100% compatible with your aunt. For those of you who don't know much about Twitter, it's a site that lets you post messages--as long as those messages don't go over 140 characters. In other words, Twitter constantly tells you to talk less. [You:] "And that's when he took out a ring, got on one knee, and..." [Twitter:] "OK. Shut up. You've reached your limit." Then Twitter will contact that woman's finacee, and tell him, "You finacee is way too talkative. Take back her ring, and spend the money on a 140 character girlfriend." It takes an hour to figure out what Twitter is--and a few hundred more hours to figure out why people use it. And then of course, there's the search engine Bing. It's confusing for another reason. Even though Bing is ranked as one of the 20 most popular sites on the internet, no one has ever actually seen someone using it. Bing has tens of millions of users--none of whom seem to exist. [Jerry Seinfeld:] "Who are these people? They must be from the Bizarro World--where people use Bing instead of Google." Google is synonymous with web searching. "Google it." As for Bing, very few people have even heard of it. If you go around talking about Binging things, most people will look at you like you're from the Bizarro World. Or even worse, they'll think, "I asked this guy about daycare centers, and he told me, 'Just bing it.' I don't know what that means--but it sounds like something that involves molesting children. I'm going to call the police." And then a few months later, a judge will tell you, "I hereby sentence you to five years in prison for first degree binging. I still don't know what binging is--but I know that I don't want some binger like you anywhere near a kindergarten." Google is by far and away my favorite website--and almost everybody else's. You're never happier to see blank white space than when you're on Google's homepage. Even the Black Panther Party loves Google's whiteness.

Sometimes it seems like Google makes things too easy. If you want directions to Bob's Pizzeria, all you need to do is type in "PIZ"--and Google will do the rest. "Based on what we know about you, it sounds like you're searching for Bob's Pizzeria. Here's the phone number, address, directions, menu, hours of operation, and the number of urinals in their men's room. We can also drive you there, chew the pizza for you, digest it, do your taxes, milk your cows, clean your gutters, steal your neighbor's newspaper, and then punch him in the face for not mowing his lawn." The other day, I went to Yahoo and asked for directions to Bob's Pizzeria. And it said, "Take Main Street 1 mile to Hill Avenue. Then you'll see my cousin JT standing next to an El Pollo Loco. He'll give you the rest of the directions. He also sells marijuana. If you want crack, you're gonna have to drive another mile on Main Street, to my cousin C-Money. He's standing outside of a Chuck E. Cheese's."

The Printing Press and the Internet

In normal life, a lot of people think something like, "My boss is a crazy bitch, my coworker's political views are freakin' stupid, and that guy sitting over there is a fat ass. And I have to keep all of that to myself, and serve that fat ass the double bacon cheeseburger he ordered." Most people are like insult factories. They manufacture 1000 insults a day--they use about one of them in normal life, and put the other 999 in a box. And when someone like that is on the internet, he opens his box, and unloads his 999 insults: "You're a fat ass / You're a bitch / Kill yourself and dig a ditch / Dump your body in that hole / " The printing press was invented around 1500. It let people copy text quickly, easily, and inexpensively. And it led to things like the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. The internet was developed and rolled out to the public around 2000. It made it a million times quicker, easier, and cheaper for people to copy, distribute, and access text, as well as audio, images, and video. That makes you think it'll turn the world into some sort of ultra high tech utopia. But then you go through some of the comments posted on a popular site like YouTube or

Facebook. And that makes you think, "Everyone on the planet is going to kill everyone on the planet by next Wednesday." If there's ever a World War III, it won't be started by some Serbian nationalist assassinating an AustroHungarian Archduke, or a German dictator invading Poland. Instead, it'll have its roots in some guy on YouTube calling some other guy on YouTube a "faggy ching chong Chinese son of a bitch." 90% of YouTube comments point directly to World War III. It's just a bunch of people attacking each other's beliefs, being racist, making unoriginal remarks, promoting extremist views, and telling each other to kill themselves. Even if Gandhi and Martin Luther King were to post comments on YouTube, Gandhi would call King "Martin Doucher Queen," and King would call Gandhi a "faggy Indian anorexic." YouTube. "Abandon civility, all ye who comment here." If someone had used Gutenberg's first printing press to print the type of stuff we see nowadays on YouTube and Facebook, Gutenberg himself would've burned that material, and then completely annihilated the printing press. And nowadays, a lot of us want to do something like that after reading some YouTube and Facebook comments on the internet. There's even a popular program that hides YouTube comments on your computer. After you install the program and go to YouTube, each video's comments are gone. Someone created a program just for that. And hundreds of thousands of people downloaded that program and use it. People who think, "It's not enough to just not read YouTube comments. Those comments are infidels, I'm on a holy war--and my motto is 'Death to the infidels!'" When computers were being developed, did anyone think that such great technology would lead to things like YouTube comments and a YouTube comment hider? Yes. The other day, I saw a 1958 video of a computer programmer who said, "Five decades from now, most of us will have our own computers--and they'll be connected to a universal system containing everyone's text, images, audio, and videos. And of course, people will use that system to tell each other things like, 'Kill yourself, you Jew nigger faggot bitch motherfucking Republican Israel loving overweight son of a bitch bastard piece of shit.' So we'll have to create a program that'll hide all of that on someone's computer. That's the future of computing. A content hider."

Here's a summary of about 20% of the internet. One person says to someone else, "You disagree with me when it comes to [insert topic here]? Interesting. OK. I want you to die. You're the most vile, disgusting, detestable piece of shit in the world." That actually sums up 90% of IMDB.com's message board. It's a place where people talk about movies and TV shows. Sort of. [Person 1:] "Arrested Development is the greatest sitcom ever." [Person 2:] "You know what? It's good--but I don't love it. I really like it. But I don't love it. You think it's the greatest sitcom ever. But you're wrong. It's good--but it's not that good. Sometimes it's kind of stupid." [Person 1:] "You sir, have insulted me. I challenge you to a duel!" CHING CHING CHING CHING. That led to a legendary July 2011 duel that lasted for 14 days, included 158 comments, and covered 12 different topics of disagreement. The first paragraph of comment 47 gives a good summary of some of the points of contention. [Person 1:] "Dude--you're an idiot. Arrested Development is way better than Seinfeld, Obama is only slightly left wing, Cuba is a great country, Israel should give back more land, string theory is flawed, Justin Bieber is really gay, and carpal tunnel syndrome is idiopathic median neuropathy at the carpal tunnel." When Jeffrey Tambour was making episodes of Arrested Development, little did he know that his mustache would lead to a 10,000 word IMDB dissertation on the quality of Cuban healthcare, and a 20,000 word dissertation on how a user named Obamination2012 has a terrible sense of humor, and should "stick to watching Larry the Cable Guy." And almost all of this content is saved. What would the internet be like now if it had been invented thousands of years ago? Just imagine going to one of Jesus's YouTube videos, and seeing a 2 millennium old comment someone left for Jesus. July 3, 30 AD. "Nice religion, loser. Do you actually think the world's going to listen to some bearded Jewish lunatic who builds shelves, talks about mustard seeds, and can't even afford sneakers? By the way--I can walk on water much better than you can. You don't even do it right. You're like that other loser on YouTube who does 100 pull ups, but only goes 98% of the way down. Those aren't real pull ups. They don't count. There's no way your religion is ever going to take off. You only have 12 followers right now--and once you die, the world will be like, 'Whatever. he's dead. That's the end of the

movement.' Dude--instead of posting videos where you walk on water or preach on a mountain, how about you make one of you crucifying yourself?" Jesus would've responded with something very kind and Christian like--only to be insulted again. And then after a few more rounds of comments, Jesus would've converted that guy to Christianity. Because there aren't too many Christian-like people on the internet. I've never seen an exchange like: [Person 1:] "Drop dead, douche." [Person 2:] "I love you." We need some sort of a modern internet Jesus. He should go from website to website, just like Jesus went from town to town. He should start with IMDB. Not only are people on the internet offensive, they're also easily offended. But they have standards that don't seem to make any sense. Go to YouTube, and you'll see some good examples. A dog getting beaten up by a deer? "Offensive. This video is offensive. Take it down, and kill yourself. In that order." A 3 year old girl getting kicked in the head by a horse? "Hilarious. Thumbs up. Make more videos like this one. I love the part where the girl gets kicked in the head by the horse. That horse is awesome--and that little girl is a dumb bitch. I'll bet she supports that war criminal President of ours. Fuck her. We should make glue out of her." It's like the internet is saying, "If you want to show someone getting hurt, it better be a 3 year old girl, and not a dog. And definitely not a cat. Cats on the internet are like cows in India. They're sacred." The internet is filled with cats, offenses, insults, and opinions. But one thing it lacks is patience. We've become used to having instant access to a lot of things. The internet is making people less and less patient--and if we don't start some sort of patience conservationist movement, then pretty soon people will start saying things like, "Arrested Development 3 is the worst movie ever. Part 1 is awesome, Part 2 is pretty good, and Part 3 is shit. I don't care if none of those movies have actually been made yet. Part 3 ruins the entire trilogy. Also, Israel should give back more land, and Larry the Cable Guy sucks." Very few people know that the world wide web was developed by a man named Tim Berners-Lee--and that he gave away the technology instead of copyrighting it. That's impressive. I like him. But he thinks he's so cool. His mother also seems pretty impressed. She always calls up my mother and brags. No matter what they're talking about, his mother somehow ends up mentioning how Tim invented the web. She says something like, "...and I found the address online. By the way, my son created that entire system. He

invented the world wide web. The most important invention in human history. So what has your son been up to? Is he still making jokes about valet parking?" Big deal, Mrs. Berners-Lee. So your son created the web. Don't forget about the porn. Someone should remind her. "Your son invented the web? Congratulations. That led to the distribution of 5 trillion millajigabytes of porn a second. We had to invent a new unit of measurement called the millajigabyte, just because of internet porn." If someone from 1985 were to get into a time machine and show up today, he'd look around tell someone, "Hi. I'm from 1985. Uh--did you guys make hoverboards and flying cars and self-tying shoes and self-drying jackets and all of that other shit?" And then the reply would be, "No--we didn't do that. Instead, we decided to make 400 billion hours of porn, and watch it. We thought about doing the flying car thing--but there was more demand for porn." I'm just glad there was no porn thousands of years ago. Otherwise, there wouldn't of been a stone age or a bronze age. "Should we make metal tools, or porn?" Good for you, Tim. You let us distribute more porn, you gave us a forum for our 999 insults, you facilitated a trillion pointless debates about everything known to man, you killed patience, and you convinced people that they should laugh when little girls get kicked by a horse. And don't forget about the upcoming "World War III--brought to you by Tim Berners-Lee's world wide web." That's your contribution to society. Enjoy your legacy. At least my valet parking jokes aren't going to start any wars.