Hey, I know that guy!

By now, especially if you ever watch sporting events (since it seems to be in heavy rotation during them), you’ve no doubt seen this clever American Express commercial:

I’ve enjoyed this commercial since I first saw it, I guess because I am always inclined to see faces in inanimate objects anyway (the front ends of cars are really like this for me), and it’s an inventive way to play up this idea.

The commercial is also memorable for the distinctive cello playing. That’s J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major for those in the know. (Me, I knew it was Bach, but I had to look up the rest.) But who played that cello piece so distinctively? A virtuoso, to be sure. Was it Yo-Yo Ma? Can you name another cello virtuoso?

Well, here’s a name for you to file away in your brain for later reference: Robert Burkhart. He’s been a part of the classical music scene in New York (and toured the world) for the past decade. But I’ll always know him as Bob — the high school orchestra director’s son and one of my most entertainingly eccentric friends in high school. Bob is a great guy and I am absolutely thrilled for him over his growing success in the music world. Way to go, Bob!

If you like what you hear, Bob recently released a CD with pianist Blair McMillen. I picked up two copies — one for myself and one for my parents. It’s called 20/21. Check it out!

You say you want a revolution? I say you want an iPad, even if you don’t think so yet

By now, lots of people have had lots to say about Apple’s latest revelation: the iPad. Opinions run the gamut from hating it (calling it a big iPod touch), to embracing it as a game-changing, revolutionary device (and calling it, essentially what Apple was working on all along).

The build-up

I’ve been thinking a lot about this device over the past couple of months, pretty much ever since I praised the litl. Even at that point, though I was skeptical that Apple was working on a tablet device, I suspected that, if they were, it would kill the litl. (And, somewhat presciently, I proposed an ideal target price of $499, which is exactly where the entry-level iPad is.)

A week earlier, I had also written about the debacle with the CrunchPad JooJoo. At that point I was still extremely skeptical that Apple was working on a tablet. At the time I wrote:

All the rumors say Apple’s tablet will be based on the iPhone OS, which seems more likely to me than a Mac OS tablet. But there’s too much about the iPhone “ecosystem” that just wouldn’t seem to translate to a larger tablet device, most obvious being the fixed display resolution. No way is Apple going to produce a device with a 10-inch screen and 480×320 resolution (even the original 1984 Macs had 512×384 displays), but by that same token, I don’t see the iPhone OS interface suddenly supporting multiple resolutions when there are over 100,000 apps all built around this one fixed resolution.

Of course now we know that Apple was working on a tablet, and it in fact does run all (well, most) iPhone apps. You can run them either at original size or pixel-doubled. But well before yesterday’s announcement, I had come to accept the general idea that Apple was working on a tablet device, that it would be based on the iPhone OS, and that, in many ways, it would resemble a “really big iPod touch.” At the same time, I also did come to believe that this was the device Apple had been aiming for all along; that the iPhone was just an intermediary step either to establish a market or simply to turn the huge amount of R&D that was going into this thing into a marketable product and bring some revenue into the project to help sustain the additional 3 years of work it required.

I’ve admitted before that up to the very minute of the iPhone’s unveiling I was denying that Apple would make a phone. I knew better than that this time around. The other half of that story is that, by the end of the keynote where the iPhone was revealed, I already desperately wanted one. I’m not so desperately craving an iPad (though I certainly would like one, especially based on first-hand reports of how amazing the user experience is), but that’s probably because I’m not the target of this device. But I know a lot of people who are.

What is a computer, and is that what you want?

Think about all of the things that a computer can do. And then think about all of the things you need to do to make a computer do the things you want it to do. Then think about all of the other things the computer can do that you have no use for. It’s all kind of a big headache, isn’t it? If you’re a “power user” like me — a programmer, a creator, a tinkerer — you’ll probably always want the flexibility, freedom, and power of a full-fledged computer. But think about people in your life who aren’t hardcore tech geeks. You probably have friends or family members who went kicking and screaming into the world of computing, most likely because it was the only reasonable way to access the Internet. The fact remains, plain and simple, that most computer users don’t need all of the things a computer can do; they don’t enjoy the hoops they have to jump through to get it to work; and, ultimately, they don’t understand their computers very well.

This is one of the expressed purposes of the litl: it’s a device techies can give to their non-techie relatives to do all of the basic computing tasks they want without constantly needing to call up the techie relative for support. But the litl falls short of that goal in two key ways: first, it is not designed to live in a household where there isn’t also a “real” computer; and second, at $699, it’s about $200 more than I think this kind of niche device should cost. There’s also an additional problem: it only offers WiFi, no 3G, so it’s not intended to leave the house — one of its creators even said as much in a comment here:

Why no 3G (at least not yet)? Wifi is still the best and most prevalent wireless networking technology at home where our device is intended to live (it’s not meant for road warriors). 3G has severe limitations when it comes to streaming video – wifi is superior here. Most home wifi is on all the time and the litl webbook is intended to remain on also. It’s a designer appliance for your home.

The litl is a designer appliance for your home. And yet it’s also supposed to be what you give Grandpa so he can look at the pictures of the grandkids that you’re posting on Flickr. You can’t have it both ways.

That dichotomy doesn’t exist with the iPad. The iPad has optional 3G, so you can take it anywhere (if you want), but most importantly, I can see the iPad existing by itself in a household that doesn’t own another computer.

Think about the things that most non-power users do with computers: They browse the web and send email. They listen to music and watch movies. They play games and read books. Occasionally they fire up Word (or whatever “lite” office suite shipped with their computers) to write a letter or do a little work from home. Guess what, the iPad does all of those things.

¡Viva la revoluçión!

I think the iPad revolutionizes the average consumer computer experience in a couple of ways. First, it eliminates all of the headaches of maintaining a computer or, for that matter, even learning how to interact with one. More on that in a minute. Second, it completely changes how computer users buy and install software. Everyone, even power users, hates the process of installing software. It’s tedious and slow, confusing and usually is presented in a convoluted and inconsistent way. But browsing the iPhone App Store is fun, and buying and installing software couldn’t be easier. The iPad brings that experience to general computing.

Back on the matter of maintenance and basic computer interaction: The biggest frustration I’ve had in providing support for friends and relatives who are not so computer savvy is the constant struggle they have with the basic interface of the computer. For people who haven’t devoted their careers to computing, like I have, the whole idiom of the graphical user interface (GUI) is perpetually confusing. What’s a window? What’s a cursor? What’s a menu? What’s a dialog box? What’s a scrollbar? I stare at a computer screen all day long; these things are as intuitive to me as the objects I deal with daily in the physical world. But that’s not the case for everyone. Even the process of using a mouse to move a cursor and interact with on-screen objects — arguably the most fundamental aspect of the GUI — is a level of abstraction a lot of users balk at. But the iPhone interface changed that. You acutally touch things with your fingers, move them around, pinch and stretch them. It’s fun, it’s intuitive, and it’s dead simple.

Sure, touchscreen interfaces have been around for years, and Windows-based touchscreen tablets have been available (if not exactly common for most of the last decade. But the GUI has essentially remained unchanged for over a quarter of a century. Just allowing a user to drag the on-screen cursor with their finger rather than with a mouse does not revolutionize the interface. Apple has reinvented the computer interface from the ground up with the iPhone and now the iPad. You were waiting for that inevitable revolution that would finally replace the GUI? Well, here it is.

And, for the geeks among us…

There’s one other, much more technical, reason why I am totally geeking out on the iPad though: HTML5. HTML5 is the “next generation” language of websites, promising new levels of interactivity and integration of multimedia into web pages that have up to this point been a tangled mess of proprietary and inconsistent plug-ins. HTML5 has been on the radar for years, but we web developers have had to drag our feet due to the glacial pace of adoption of new browsers. As long as a majority of users were still running Internet Explorer 6 — an ancient web browser that even Microsoft itself has by now denounced — our hands were tied regarding making full use of these new technologies. But the surging popularity of mobile devices, most importantly the iPhone but also Android-based smartphones, has opened up a huge new market where IE6 is irrelevant and HTML5-friendly browsers are the norm. Sure, you could use Firefox, Safari or Chrome (the only options for Mac users, and many smart Windows users have already made the switch), but here’s a brand new computing platform that brings all of these capabilities to a full-resolution (1024×768) screen.

Apple has wholeheartedly embraced HTML5 with the iTunes LP format, and it’s at the core of iBooks. Up to now, electronic books have typically been PDF-based, or some other, similar proprietary format. PDF is great, but it’s also an old format, and is fairly limited. HTML5 provides an easy way for content creators to enhance their presentations with fully-integrated audio and video, not to mention the interactive possibilities that CSS3, JavaScript, and offline data storage allow. This format makes it possible to create full, standalone applications as easily as creating a website (which, believe me, is easier than creating a full-fledged application in a traditional programming language). Sure, others have embraced this kind of web model, notably Palm, but only Apple has just the right mix of factors — market share, hardware/software integration, and, let’s face it, vision — to push something like this in the way to make it catch on.

You want it, you just don’t know what “it” is yet

There’s plenty of criticism of some of Apple’s practices — the iPad, like the iPhone, is a closed system; there’s DRM all over it; Apple is the gatekeeper for just about anything that goes in or out of the system. I can’t argue with those criticisms, other than to say, no one is forcing you to buy an Apple product. But those limitations are a trade-off for what Apple’s products offer: a uniquely integrated, incredibly polished, revolutionary experience. And, despite Apple’s lockdown of the top layers of the system, there’s openness at the core: Mac OS X and iPhone OS are based on an open source core and Apple is aggressively promoting the use of open standards like HTML5/CSS3 as the way to do things. Could it be more open? Of course it could. But then it wouldn’t be Apple. Open platforms are chaotic platforms. If you want to tinker with the system, or you just fundamentally believe in the principle of open software, then go get a Nexus One (and try to convince yourself that Google, deep down, believes in open systems too).

The arguments over open platforms could go on all day, but in the end I think it comes down to this: it has been Apple’s (and, largely, Steve Jobs’) vision for amazing — in Jobs’ long-echoed words, “insanely great” — technology devices that has driven these markets forward throughout the past decade. Do you think MP3 players would be where they are today if Apple hadn’t produced the iPod? It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it fundamentally changed what an MP3 player is. Do you think we’d be talking about “apps” and that everyone would be carrying the Internet in their pockets if Apple hadn’t produced the iPhone? It wasn’t the first smartphone with Internet access, but again, it fundamentally changed what a smartphone is.

And now, the coup de grâce: the iPad. I won’t go so far as to say it changes what a computer is, on a fundamental level. But it creates something new: a consumer device that is a permanent replacement for consumer-grade computers. It’s what most people have wanted all along, but settled for a computer because what they wanted didn’t exist. Yet. And now it does.

The good, the bad, and the Apple

Ultimately, is it “all that”? I think the experience of using it, and what it represents for transforming the consumer computer industry, transcends what a list of its tech specs and features can convey. But in basic, concrete terms, it pretty much ended up being exactly what I was anticipating by now in terms of what it looks like, what it does, and how you interact with it. I was least surprised by its name — I had long suspected (though it’s easy to claim so after the fact) that it would be called the iPad, connotations of feminine hygiene products notwithstanding. There were, however, three things that genuinely surprised me, two good and one bad:

The good: 1) Price. I was hoping for, but not expecting, a price under $500. Granted, that’s just the entry-level model; they run as high as $829. But the fact that you can get an iPad for $499 is huge. 2) The A4 chip. I had absolutely no expectation that Apple would be developing a custom processor for this thing; it was not on my radar whatsoever. But from what I’ve read, this custom-built, highly-optimized chip is the key to the iPad’s blazing speed and overall awesomeness.

The bad: AT&T is the exclusive provider of 3G access. Seriously? This is a bit of a double-edged sword. I’m glad 3G is an option at all; the iPad easily could have shipped as a WiFi-only device, like the litl. But I, and many others, expected yesterday’s announcement to include Apple’s long-awaited untethering* from AT&T for the iPhone, and, needless to say, for the new iPad as well. Boo.

The Apple: No Flash. OK, this didn’t surprise me one bit, so I didn’t mention it above when I cited three surprises. But I needed to complete the pun I started in the header of this section, so here you go. No Flash. Never had it, never will. And like John Gruber (and for exactly the same reasons), I believe that’s a good thing. I recognize the seeming contradiction of criticizing Adobe for a closed system like Flash while praising Apple’s own closed systems, but there are some fundamental differences that, well, make all the difference. Apple’s closed systems are at the hardware and (locally-installed) software level. Adobe’s closed system is on the Internet — in the “cloud” in contemporary parlance. Adobe’s closed system is something that floats around out in the otherwise open, standards-based world of the Internet. It’s a way for Adobe to wall off part of the Internet in a bubble that it controls.

This is bad for a hardware maker like Apple, because as Gruber says, it prevents them from being able to fix problems caused by the fact that Adobe’s bubble isn’t sealed up quite as tightly as it should be (and, of course, it is a back door to allow people to bypass Apple’s systems). It’s also bad for us content creators because we’re beholden to Adobe to get our content online (in the form of having to buy Adobe’s high-priced software), and we’re dependent upon Adobe’s continued existence (and goodwill) to keep things running. What if Adobe goes out of business, or just abandons Flash? What happens to our Flash-based content then? HTML and JavaScript will never go out of business, because there’s no single corporate owner acting as gatekeeper over those technologies. And that is a fundamental difference between what Adobe is keeping closed vs. what Apple is.

* Pun intended, and kudos to you, geek that you are, for picking up on it.

What does Route 66 sound like?

Much of it is probably pretty quiet these days. I know the remnant of the once great U.S. Route 66 running through the Cajon Pass in Southern California is an all-but-forgotten back road now: Interstate 15 roars with 8-plus lanes of cars and trucks 24 hours a day, while less than a mile away, the former divided 4-lane Route 66 has been reduced to a single 2-lane blacktop county road, with the abandoned southbound lanes left overgrown with weeds and populated intermittently with parked cars, their occupants wistfully dreaming of the glory days of the erstwhile “Main Street of America.”

My latest music project, entitled simply 66, is a 21-minute, 10-part suite that seeks to capture, in my own quasi-prog-rock fashion, some of the experience of cruising along the “Mother Road” from its origin at Lake Michigan in Chicago, through St. Louis, across the American Southwest (following, roughly, the path of current Interstate 40), past the Grand Canyon, into the California High Desert and on to the Pacific shore in Santa Monica.

Route 66 is in many ways a symbol of America, from its optimistic (if never so simple and wholesome as some prefer to remember) origins in westward expansion, to its decommissioning in the 1970s with the advent of bigger and better freeways, and its subsequent haphazard mix of abandonment and preservation. Route 66 represents the best and worst of the American prospect. It’s a fitting inspiration for an extended, varied, and ultimately unpredictable piece of music.

You can listen to the entire album online or download it for free at my official 66 album page. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Why I’ve (mostly) stopped using Facebook

I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but I made a pair of them this year. And now that we’re almost two weeks into the new year, it seems like a good time to investigate whether I’ve been able to keep up with them.

My first resolution was a healthier lifestyle. Nothing drastic, and nothing too rigid. It’s a few simple rules:

1. No alcohol more than once a week. That glass of beer or wine… or two… at dinner adds a lot of calories.

2. No second helpings. It doesn’t take long for your appetite to adjust to match the amount of food you’re shoving down your gullet. Eat less, consistently, and pretty soon you’ll want less.

3. Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. I’ve typically done OK with vegetables, but rarely touched fruit. Clementines are my new best friend.

4. Get at least some exercise. Who needs workout equipment when you’ve got a flight of stairs in your house?

And most importantly:

5. Don’t stress it too much. One day of breaking the rules doesn’t mean you’re off the diet.

So far, the first resolution is going along… pretty well. Mainly because of #5.

As for the second resolution… it was “No more Facebook.”

A few years ago, the need for such a resolution would have seemed absurd to me: I was incredibly disdainful of Facebook (and social networking in general) for ages. It wasn’t until I sort of (yeah, sort of) needed a Facebook account, for work-related research purposes in early 2008, that I got into it, and I was quickly hooked. Checking Facebook on my iPhone in every spare moment. Carrying on a third-person monologue in my head as I constantly anticipated my next Facebook post. It was kind of ridiculous. (Yeah, kind of.)

But this was another fairly easy resolution for me, and not just because of #5 (although it’s there). I had already begun to sour on Facebook in the final months of 2009, getting to the point where most of my posts on Facebook were only arriving there second-hand, via automatic cross-posting from Twitter (my new, slightly healthier, if only because it has less empty calories, social networking metaphorical junk food of choice) or from my blogs (via NetworkedBlogs).

So what was it that soured me on Facebook, that once indispensable hub of my ersatz social life? It was a variety of factors; factors which I have in my head named in honor of the Facebook friends in whom they’ve most strongly manifested for me (though whose names I will conceal here, since NetworkedBlogs is going to post a link to this blog entry on Facebook on my behalf). It was also the growing privacy and security concerns surrounding the fact that though many Americans fear the specter of an implausible — nay, impossible, owing to a lack of both funding and competence — Big Brother in our government, we’re only too willing to share every minute detail of our personal lives with the very real and technologically marvelous Big Brother of private enterprise.

This interview may be fake (and, then again, maybe not), but the programmatic surveillance it describes is real. I know, because in my line of work, I not only pay attention to the man behind the curtain, I am him. And unlike the Wizard of Oz, who’s all smoke and mirrors, these web applications really do work. The databases really are there. And the engineers really can peek inside them. (Even if they can’t actually read your one-way encrypted password, they don’t really need to. They can see the Matrix. And now I’m taking the movie metaphors a bridge too far. See?)

So then, we’re back to the real reason I decided to (mostly) stop using Facebook. Those friends, and the ways that my online interactions with them soured my experience of Facebook and, in a way, my life.

Cognitive dissonance

We all have our political views. Some of us hold to them more dearly than others. Some of us make our lives about our politics more than others. But in general, when we deal with each other face-to-face, we smooth over them. We focus on the things we have in common, the things that bring us together. If those things do not include our politics (and, in meatspace, they most often do not), then we check them at the door. But by the time Facebook came along, many of us were already used to a new social world online: a distilled, supersaturated, echo chamber of a world, where we only expose ourselves to the things we are most interested in, only interact with those who share our interests, and do it all under a cloak of anonymity that allows us to brazenly parade the crackpot ideas we wisely keep to ourselves in our “real-life” interactions. So what happens when we bring our “offline” friends into this online realm? It’s not pretty.

I found myself engaging in frustrating arguments over all manner of political, economic and philosophical topics with people I had never (or rarely) had cause to discuss them with before. And I realized why. It’s easy for someone to counter my revulsion over this experience with claims that I need to be open to differing opinions and all of that. Sure. I recognize that not everyone agrees with me. I know those opinions exist. But I don’t enjoy debating all of them ad nauseum like I’m in a freshman seminar course. And I don’t need to start thinking as negatively of my friends as I do of Glenn Beck. But since I still can’t let this kind of thing go without trying to get in the last word, I just want to leave this topic with a great (if not so inclusively worded) quote from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own fact.”

Three’s Company

I watched a lot of Three’s Company as a kid. Given the level of sexual innuendo in the show, perhaps a lot more than I should have been allowed to. But I turned out relatively OK. More than the lewd themes, however, the one thing that has stuck with me most about that show is how just about everything that goes wrong in life can be attributed to a lack of communication. Facebook is all about communication. And yet, there are so many ways in which it can fail us. Put aside any legitimate technical glitches like server outages. Facebook is programmed to filter out certain communications. There’s just so much information (if it can honestly be called that) people are dumping into Facebook’s databases every second of the day, and that could be shown on so many other people’s news feeds, that the site has to have a threshold for messages to hide, whether we as the users set it or the site’s programmers impose it arbitrarily. Bottom line: just because it’s there doesn’t mean you’re going to see it.

Plus, even though Facebook does show you when your friends are online at the same time as you are, it doesn’t tell you anything else about their viewing history on the site. To do so would be an unforgivable breach of the illusion of privacy all of Facebook’s users operate under. But the downside is that if you sent a friend a message and they never responded, you have no way of knowing if they read the message or not, or if they’ve even logged into Facebook since you sent it. And, depending on the situation and the nature of your message, this can lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Listen, Larry. Just because you see Jack out on a date with a pair of twins by himself, doesn’t mean he didn’t stop by the Regal Beagle looking for you to join in on the fun. You just happened to be helping Mr. Roper fix the leaky faucet in Janet and Chrissy’s bathroom in a way that sounded like something completely different to Mrs. Roper when she came upstairs unexpectedly and heard the two of you behind that closed door.*

Where was I going with this?

Ceci n’est pas un ami

What is a friend? Everyone in our social networks on Facebook is a “friend,” but that’s an empty term. I have 137 “friends” in my Facebook network, which is apparently just below the median of approximately 150 that was much discussed in the blogoverse over the summer. It still sounds like a hell of a lot of friends to me! I never knew I was such a social butterfly.

As I suspect is the case with most average Facebook users (let’s exclude Roger Federer for the moment), they’re a mix of old friends from high school and college; former coworkers from the various jobs I’ve had since then; and current “offline” friends, neighbors and relatives — this last group being the only ones I really still interact with in my real life.

It’s been great catching up with old high school friends via Facebook. I suspect that Facebook has singlehandedly redefined the purpose of (or perhaps obviated entirely) that venerable institution: the class reunion. We’ll see when I have my 20th in a couple years. It’s clear though that right now I have ready access to the minutiae of the daily lives of lots of people I haven’t seen regularly since the era when Milli Vanilli was still considered a legitimate musical act. They’re people with whom, when we first reunited at the beginning of this decade after ten years apart, I had already completely lost touch. But now, thanks to Facebook, I feel like I have the keys to all of their diaries in my desk drawer.

Most of them are people I still like well enough, and of whom I have fond (if faded) memories from the “glory days” (not that they ever really were). But if I’m honest about it, I really don’t have much in common with any of them anymore (not that I ever really did), and there’s pretty much no way we’d even know each other today, much less be friends, if we didn’t share the common bond of having grown up in the ’80s in a small town on a dirty river that smelled like pork byproducts.

And yet, there are some among them with whom I do share a lot of common interests, and with whom I still could be good friends today. We even live in the same city. Come to think of it, we’ve even run into each other on the street in recent years, and have talked about “getting together sometime soon.” We have ready access to each other on a daily basis via Facebook, and yet, “sometime soon” never arrives.

There’s a saying (at least I think it’s a saying, which is to say I recently heard someone say it) that you never really explore your own city until you have out-of-town visitors. And I’m not entirely sure how that relates to the question of why I don’t get together with my former (and potentially future) very good friends with whom I share common interests, and who happen to live in the same city as I do, and with whom I can easily communicate on a daily basis via Facebook. But I think it’s probably a lot like that saying about getting to know your city. When something is always there, you don’t bother to take advantage of it because, well, it’s always there. Facebook makes it too easy to reconnect with old friends, at least in a superficial way. And that superficial way is almost more harmful than having no contact, because it makes it way too easy to settle for what it is, instead of investing the small amount of additional effort required to make a deeper connection.

So, after all of that, am I really off Facebook?

I’ve given plenty of good (if “good” is measured by verbosity) reasons why I’ve intended to quit Facebook as one of this year’s resolutions, but have I lived up to it?

The short answer, coming from someone not known for short answers (hence this long build-up): sort of. I have taken several concrete steps to significantly reduce my involvement with Facebook. I changed my notification preferences — I had previously set Facebook to never notify me by email about anything, since I was always checking the site anyway — so that if something really important does come my way, I can find out about it without constantly wading through Farmville updates** and alerts about which of my friends are now friends with other people I will never know. I never post status updates directly to Facebook, leaving it to Twitter (with which I also have an ambivalent relationship) and NetworkedBlogs to do my dirty work, although I do occasionally follow up on comments on my posts. Once every couple of days I’ll quickly scan the live feed to see if anyone’s saying or doing anything I’m genuinely interested in, but I limit it to a minute or two. And on special occasions (like when I took my dad to our first ever Vikings game on January 3), I’ll post photos to my profile. But that’s it, and it’s more than enough.

Is my life better with less Facebook in it? Unequivocally, yes. I do feel slightly less connected with my widely dispersed “network” of social acquaintances, but I also have a much more realistic view of how disconnected we really were anyway, despite the fact that I knew what they were eating for lunch.

Final thought

Knowing that this blog entry is going to appear in my Facebook feed, I feel the situation can best be described in the words of Sideshow Bob: “By the way, I am aware of the irony of appearing on television in order to decry it. So don’t bother pointing that out.”

* OK, I don’t think this scenario ever actually happened on Three’s Company. And yet, in a way, didn’t it happen on every single episode?

** Yes, I know you can hide that crap, and I always do with such a vengeance that at one point I almost considered unhiding all of them just so I could have the pleasure of hiding them all again.