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It ended as awkwardly as it began, perhaps even more so with an explosion of full frontal male nudity and gore.
I went in to Observe and Report, Seth Rogen's latest vehicle, forewarned that some of the subject matter was going to be offensive. That the film would try to take comedy to a dark place, not usually trod upon in films that reach wide release.
Part of the decline of newspapers, what part wasn't decimated by the excesses of private capital, came from Craigslist offering up a free marketplace for classified ads selling everything from socks to sex. In the past few weeks, in a cute bit of irony, I've been turning to the site looking for media jobs gradually being undermined by the service.
Fees, like captchas, are barriers to entry. When you charge for a service it discourages people from signing up and abusing (or even just using) the service as it changes the math of a break-even point for your scam. Newspapers offered that kind of barrier, though it was penetrated on occassion by the more ambituous, but Craigslist only attempts it for some real estate listings and ads from sex workers who, but for a wink and a nod, are pimping themselves to anyone that will look.
It is up to the community to point out the scams by flagging them and hectoring them with response posts warning their fellow users. For Craigslist the system makes sense, since there are thousands of listings posted every minute all across the world and it would be impossible to review them without grinding things to a halt, but in that darkness scams and shams proliferate.
On April 1, 2008 you couldn't click on a link without first hitting the mute button.
It was all you could do to protect yourself from the potential minefield of "Rick Rolls" that was the Internet's response to April Fool's. It had been a running gag in the months ahead but the sheer pervasiveness of the meme that day pushed it into the mainstream.
Later that year we'd see a live demonstration at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, leaving many news anchors conused and bewildered as they attempted to figure out what was going on. Thankfully, it was the death knell of the Rick Roll and probably the first paying gig that Mr. Astley had in years.
This year the tricks have been equally uninspired. For the particularly lazy we simply announce in our Facebook status that our ideologies and worldviews have changed to the polar opposite, and that we're now gleefully awaiting the rapture.
The mall was oddly croweded for a ghost town. The weakest shops at the Independence Mall had already disappeared and others were following it. In front of the Best Buy there were plenty of cars but stepping insde there weren't many carrying shopping bags or taking things up to the counter, just browsing.
My younger brother rolled his eyes, he had seen the same behavior when he worked at Circuit City. People thinking about what they might be buying if their credit card limits hadn't been slashed, and if they weren't trying to save up money in case they lost their jobs.
While recently there have been a few sparks of hope, the American economy is still in the doldrums but government wants to fix that.
I spent half-an-hour stuffing a box with the accumulation of almost two years of a job that I alternately loved and hated. I had been warned, and when I saw the e-mail in my box that morning about a meeting with the boss at the end of the day I knew that it was coming. So I quietly packed up my stuff, indifferent to what was going on around me, and left the office. My one regret was that I didn't raid the supply closet.