If not for weatherbug on my phone, I would've been completely
surprised by the impending... Nothing.

Today is iDay 2.0 or the release of the second version of the iPhone called the iPhone 3G. The nomenclature has the adverse effect of causing people to call the original iPhone the "second Gen" and thus confusing many, or at least just me. After my participation in the original iDay on June 29th I was happy to once again join into all the fun and excitement that can be had while standing in a row. Knowing demand was not going to exceed last year and that this year's model had a release time during most people's work schedules, I assumed the same size line or slightly less. So with cash in hand at 5:30 this morning (t-minus 2h30) I headed to the apple store and found a fairly small line with myself in a low 30's in position. I was originally going to wait at an AT&T store but the lines were about the same for smaller stores with less employees. (not to mention AT&T's legendary ability to suck) What I did not factor in was that proximity to an AT&T store is not a factor when measuring AT&T's ability to suck.

The line went smoothly with various news crews and apple employees handing out water to those in line. The mall security, always happy to assert authority with anyone who will agree to it, made us rearrange our line to form "an aisle for mall traffic" a full 3 hours before the mall officially opened. Opening time finally came and probably 50 bouncy appleheads greeted us. Then came the unexpected part, they let about 12 people in and then stopped the line. A full 15 minutes passed before cheers came from the store heralding the first successful purchase. Slowly they brought us in one by one and then it was my turn I was prepared more than average but in for a less than average trip.

I was originally thinking of white for myself and the wife wanted black. I told my salesmen what I wanted and how I wanted to pay, with cash. Apparently this is a no-no. I was unaware that sometime overnight cash became non-legal tender in the U.S.. At least it appeared so. After about 20 minutes we had converted my cash to gift cards which somehow ARE legal tender and we were back at step 1. We finally begin the new activation process. About 3 steps in I get a message about an "IRU" which means nothing to me or the apple employees. Further investigation reveals this means they think I'm a business.
In actuality I'm only in the business of trying to buy a dang cell phone but it is baseing this assumption on the fact I used to have a discount on my account through my employer. I call AT&T and they claim to remove everything that says I'm a business. By this time I've lost my sales guy and have to wait for next available.

I get a new sales guy and by this time decide maybe I want black after all and ask for two black. We try to order and even after removing the discount, no joy. More calls and no real help from AT&T's call center and multiple AT&T server outages later, I am informed I need to go to an AT&T store to solve this problem within AT&T's system. This is of course after 11 by this point and all AT&T stores are sold out. I try one AT&T store with a short line and find that they are sold out and are taking ship-to-store orders. These are being done because AT&T backlogged a large amount of stock in their warehouse so they can later ship it to the stores with pre-paid sales instead of trying to second-guess demand. Once I am in the AT&T store and almost ready to pay for my phones I'm told that they don't take cash either.

I head to the bank and deposit the cash, luckliy they still accept it. After some time for venting I head to a store where I know one of the salesmen and know he can tell a cell phone from a hole in the ground. He has no real problems with ordering but by the time we get the paperwork done, the warehouse is now out of black. He asks if I'm set on "Vader" or want to order two "Stormtroopers" (white) instead. I finally agree and he gets them marked for expedited shipping. Fingers crossed I leave the store with little more than a few slips of paper and a hopefullness that they will arrive soon.

Well the iPhone3G was pretty cool when I played with it in the store at least...

Upon a recent trip the the one-page bookstore (anything that costs $4 should be a book, not a card) I noticed a "pop culture" section with movie and tv quotes on them. Being a geek of the big and small screen, I was very interested. I initially saw a top gun quote, although it probably wasn't one everyone thinks of immediately. I checked out a few other cards and found a good portion were from "high school musical" which is like grease, except for 13 year olds. I understand "pop culture" isn't a well-defined category, but I would generally think a two-year old made-for-tv movie (cable even) wouldn't have earned such prestige that it would usher out more longstanding pop culture icons. I also found at least one for the TV show "Lost" and the intersperesed with the "pop culture of the last two years" cards I found a few that dated back 50 years. Apprently these cards are not meant for those between 16 and 61.

I realized that this desire of the masses to capture the "pop culture" market and try to commercialize on it (which is ironic, in and of itself) may be getting out of hand. I recently watched the pseuo-indie film Juno thanks to my friendly neighborhood redbox machine (and the free rental codes from insideredbox.com.) A lot of people talked this up and when people start mislabelling low-budget films as "indie" and then start talking about how great they are, I generally turn off. After seeing enough parodies however, I wanted to see the original product.

Juno is about a teenage girl dealing with pregnancy. Being as this is the theme of the movie, it was a bit surprising to me that they could've dropped the pregnant suit and 95% of the movie would've worked the same. In total there were less than a handful of references to her actual dealing with the pregnancy. Pop culture references were present but felt "injected" into the movie as did Rainn Wilson's character who seemed to have a scene in the movie just so they could say "Hey look, it's that guy from The Office, isn't that wacky!" Everything seemed a bit "off" to me throughout the movie including the main character interest in acts such as iggy pop without a single friend or family member sharing that interest. Who introduced her to anti-establishment punk of the 70's?

I never really realized how disingenous the references were until the main character announces her water breaking by yelling "Thundercats are go!" While most people chuckled, my ears perked up. Thundercats being a series when I was a kid I enjoy a good Thundercats reference. However, the line "Thundercats are go" never happened in the show so even if Juno was watching TV when she was -15 years old, she still wouldn never have heard that. Instead, the Thundercats would rally behind the cry "Thundercats Ho!" So where did the "Are go" come from you ask? In the 1960's (when Juno was -35ish) there was a super-marionetta show called "The Thunderbirds" about a group of rescuers with strange flying machines who announced "Thunderbirds are go" when they spring into action. During the 60's there wasn't a huge amount of children watching science-fiction puppet shows on TV so even if it wasn't 40 years old, it is still not that well known.

What struck me is that it is a major line in the movie but it's wrong.. The most highlighted pop culture reference and it's wrong? Mistakes happen, yes. The author is a of the right age to know the TV show but maybe someone directed to put in more references like this. The director, who recently directed and produced the 2007 holiday ads for wal-mart (not kidding) should also bare some of the blame. I blame the major studios who want to find the next "hot new director" or writer by pairing them up and put big movie hype behind freshman work.