I bite my thumb at Windows!

Okay, Bill, here's the deal. Windows has given us many wondrous things. Excel. OneNote. Kudos to you.

But I despise your stinky, stinky media player, and let me tell you why. I go to CNN.com for news occasionally, and damned if every story I want to "read" isn't a video, as though we were a nation of complete morons who can't read a single word of English. Fine. I'm hardly an intellectual elitist--I watch plenty of bad television, and I'll play along. I'll play your damn video if you're too lazy to write a story about it. That's cool.

But it isn't. Not really.

I have installed the Windows Media Player approximately 937 times. I've got version 11 right here, baby! But every single time I click on a CNN story, it tells me, "Sorry Charlie, you need the Windows Media Player." In vain I yell at it and tell it that I HAVE the damn media player. Look AGAIN! I shout. But no. And daily, I swear on the tattered remains of my mortgaged soul, CNN's content becomes more and more video and less and less text. Because apparently the folks at CNN have no opposable thumbs and have been forced to compose their stories entirely with their index fingers and a remote control. Dang, that Anderson Cooper looked like he had thumbs. Fine figure of a man to be reporting on all manner of world injustice without a single thumb--my hat is off to him, for truly, he is a thumbless inspiration to us all.

(Actually, Cooper's blog is one of the few reliable sources of text, so I take it back. But only the stuff about him--CNN is really catering to feckless illiterates. But only feckless illiterates with Windows.)

So I'm cutting out the middleman. I'm just going to administer myself a powerful electric shock when I go to CNN.com. Because, really, it's just a lesson in annoyance and monopoly, and although it's convenient, it's not as though it's an international symbol of reporting excellence, and for the love of all that is holy, I really don't understand why the site won't just PLAY THE DAMN VIDEO.

In conclusion, I believe that the Windows Media Player and CNN are joint harbingers of the end of days. I await the coming apocalypse. I just hope I don't have to try to watch it on CNN.com.



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Inside jokes (just because):
For Natalie, "Why for you no have tattoo?"
For anyone with encyclopedic knowledge of the Dick Van Dyke show, I bet the good folks at CNN have also lost their sense of humor.