Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

MD

Mavis Drouk, emotional escrow officer

Believed to be near Harrisburg, PA

Stability. Passion is what people choose when they still believe a staircase can be made entirely of sparks. Stability may not sing outside your window, but it does remember where the insurance cards are.

RC

Rufus Clenn, freelance thunder consultant

Last reported west of Tulsa, OK

Passion, obviously. Stability is just boredom wearing shoes with arch support. I want life to arrive late, smell faintly of lightning, and explain nothing until several lamps have been broken.

NV

Nora Vell, deputy curator of small regrets

Possibly sheltering in Eugene, OR

Passion is useful for beginnings, stability for the paperwork afterward. I prefer both in moderation, which is another way of saying I would like to be ruined briefly and then driven home safely.

New iPad 5 Will Introduce Fading Keypad Letters

13 years Chip Hilton

A baby curiously touching a man's face while he lies on grass.

The big whisper from the Apple campus here in Cupertino is that Apple’s new iPad 5 and iPad Mimi 2 will introduce fading keypad letters. This innovation, one of several iPad redesign elements in the offing, has the potential to be the breakout star of Apple’s fall launch event scheduled for October 22.

“Our development teams have been hard at work on a truly amazing new feature that we can’t wait to introduce,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a conference call earlier this week.

Mr. Cook then said that the rumored 64-bit processor, a 20-percent-thinner screen, and narrower bezels for the iPad 5 would not be “the big news” at Apple’s October 22 event.

“Those items are available already in the iPhone 5s and the iPad Mini I,” he continued. “Cannibalizing them for the iPad would be enough to excite the faithful and move a lot of units, but as Steve (Jobs) was fond of saying, ‘He who isn’t busy being born is busy dying.’ So we need to reach out to people who have resisted the iPad experience because it doesn’t provide everything they’re used to with desktop computers. We think we’ve found a way to do that.”

an image

Enter the fading keypad, which is designed to mimic “the old-shoe look of an actual keyboard after it’s been beat to merde,” said one source at Apple. Toward that end the letters and symbols on the keys on the fading keypad will “just disappear eventually if they get used enough.”

Is Apple banking on the fact that people for whom life just wouldn’t be the same without clapped out n, s, o, or u keys might now become Apple converts?

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer refused to confirm or deny the fading keyboard rumors, but he did say that if a customer with a faded keypad chose to, he could return that iPad 5 to Apple and receive a new one for a service fee of $99.95, just as people do when iPad batteries go tits up.

The preceding is satire. Straight up, Skippy. No warranties are expressed or implied. For life advice, try a professional. For investment tips, try a dart board. For salvation, the gentleman in the robe has been handling that portfolio for 2,000 years.

The Pug Bus Breaking News

The Pug Bus Breaking News requires no email address, no mother's maiden name, no first pet's nickname, and no DNA sample. You simply mash the link below and read.

Deliver It

⚡ Scholars at the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Obvious Things have concluded, after eleven years of exhaustive inquiry, that people who speak at great length in meetings do not thereby become more correct. The findings have been submitted to a committee for review.

⚡ It has been determined by authorities in several jurisdictions that the phrase "I just want to be honest with you" reliably precedes the portion of the conversation one would most prefer not to have. Legislation is pending.

⚡ The Bureau of Perpetual Reassessment has announced that this is not, in fact, the most divided the nation has ever been, a distinction that continues to belong to a prior era when the disagreements concerned rather more consequential matters and people occasionally died over them.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly arranged as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval ...

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

Read It All

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

The years do not accuse.
They simply pile up like newspapers you meant to read,
each one carrying news that is no longer news.

You think: I should have said that differently.
I should have stayed. I should have gone.
The mind is efficient this way,
filing the same cases under the same wrong headings,
finding them again at 3 a.m. in perfect order.

What surprises is not the weight of it
but the patience —
how regret waits,
how it has nowhere else to be,
how it sits across from you at breakfast
and asks for nothing,
knowing you will offer it everything
on your own.

The body slows.
The catalog does not.
You carry the unlived lives
the way old houses carry
the smell of people who are gone —
not haunting exactly,
just present,
just there,
just refusing
the simple courtesy
of leaving.