Doubleplus
The AmericanPeople® woke up to learn that, consistent with its zeal to make great again all things, the executive branch of the United States of America, on behalf of its hard-working taxpayers (the ones who bankroll the military industrial complex), ordered big bombs be dropped from big planes on The Hooters in Yemen.
Hooters?
Yes.
Now, don’t go taking me literally, but do take me seriously. Or I may be joking. Or I may be exaggerating (only people who don’t love me would call it lying). And even if it is “lying,” so long as you get your tRuth across the goal line it’s not like anyone with the attention span of a fruit fly is going to detect the end run, amirite? tRuth lies on a spectrum. Don’t believe me? Google it. It’s true. The tRuth is like a mental health disorder. Or it’s like pornography, you know it when you see it, so long as you don’t gawk too long and overthink it, it’s ok. Like that horror in Ohio a while back. A neighborhood dog was spotted on an outdoor barbecue, medium-well. Or was it a cat? No matter. And it doesn’t matter if wasn’t either. The tRuth is that anyone who would do such a thing is a horrible person. Sometimes the tRuth has to go in search of its own evidence. But a tRuth teller can’t always wait for that.
Naturally, this taxpayer clicked the link to learn more as to why the executive branch ordered the bombing. And here’s the craziest thing – I was redirected to a page with a report on the bombing, which included Ads for Hooters. To know me is to love me. And if you love me you know I’m being honest. Hooters! Our executive’s reasons for bombing The Hooters in Yemen were, of course, spotless and tRue. No problem there, and I’ll get to that. But those Ads, they just kept refreshing themselves and distracting me. Like you’re reading sugary drinks are bad for you while being coaxed to click an Ad for Coke. I mean it does make you wonder, right, how do they do it? You’re on a page reading about how bad X is and up pops an Ad for X!
Digression: Quite a while ago I had the temerity to apply for a job at a FAANG company. The screener I spoke with described the role the company was recruiting for. He said it would involve creating software to process a bazillion user clicks on Ads his company had hosted on a bazillion pages all over the Internet. My mission, were I to accept it (were he to offer it ;-)), would be to build a real-time system to process this continuous stream of user clicks on Ads, and then order the Ads according to their probability of popularity. And then use the result to prioritize which Ads to place on the page visited by new users. The theory being that the most popular Ads were more likely to be clicked and stuff purchased, so the company could make more money. The screener directed me to an interactive online whiteboard, then asked me to “sketch” out the program I would write to accomplish this task, as he looked on.
I failed. That’s right, thirty+ years of programming computers, two advanced STEM degrees, plus a head for math, and I failed. I failed because I am a slow-twitch builder of things. Like there are people with fast-twitch muscles and people with slow-twitch muscles. The former excel at activities that require explosive bursts of speed sustainable for a short period of time, whereas the latter tend to be slower but endurable. Think the Hare and the Tortioise. I am the Tortiose (goo-goo g’joob). FAANG companies don’t hire tortoises, they want hares. The screener was very gracious, I can tell you know what you’re doing but maybe this isn’t your particular “problem space?” That, and my heart simply wasn’t in it. We thanked each other and hung up.
So while those Ads for Hooters were insistently flashing at me, begging I click, I thought back to that interview and figured the company had eventually found its hare. Instead of an up and comer at the company I’d been diminished as its victim. The least I could do now was resist becoming another data point in the hare’s statistical model. So I didn’t click on an Ad. Take that! I did, however, continue with the article to learn the tRuth behind the bombings. Turns out the executive’s second in command had convinced the executive of the deviant nature of the business model at The Hooters in Yemen. It had gotten so out of hand in fact that twenty-something girly-girls, dressed in skimpy, skin-tight orange shorts and tank tops, had “weaponized” their breasts! They would position themselves on the shore of the Red Sea and on command lift their tank tops high over their heads to expose their naked breasts to the captains of US-flagged cargo ships! Wanting to get a closer look, naturally the captains turned to port, unfortunately at their peril, as the girly-girls did this very near a submerged offshore reef known for tearing massive holes in ships, even double-hulled ships.
On hearing of this terror, which the executive assumed was the tRuth – and even if not so what – he ordered the bomb bays filled and commanded America’s finest be dispatched from the airfields in Saudi Arabia to carry out the mission. Doubleplus, the pilots were equipped with helmet cams so the murder and carnage could be live-streamed, which it was, to a hi-res monitor placed on the executive’s desk, where his aids said he viewed the horror with a contemptuous smirk while downing his lunch of two McDonald’s quarter pounders and large Coke.