Well, the downfall of our society continues.

Gone are the good ‘ole days of yore, when you could spend a butt load of cash and actually get something of quality. See-ya later! Peace out! Yep, now all we have is a world where if you spend a butt load of cash, you’ll just get a piece of crap that makes you feel rich (even though you’ll be broke).

Case in point. One of my fellow Cellfishers recently purchased the Nokia N95. Price tag… $800.00 (= $800.00 Canadian = 10 Euros). For the sake of protecting his identity I will call him Barry Plandesberg. So Barry had his shiny new phone. A 5 Mega Pixel camera, awesome video camera, sexy slide activation, all kinds of bells and whistles. (Check out what the Diva said about it, here.) So Barry was braggin’ as was his right, that Nokia bad boy was sleek as heck.

Ah, but how fleeting bragging rights can be. Now it’s two weeks later and the ear piece is totally crackling, the videos are saved so big that they can’t be sent to anyone, the phone crashes approx. once every hour, the video phone call feature is not available in the USA, and the screen is constantly covered in face cheese. Needless to say, poor Barry is frickin’ pissed.

If the N95 was the only high-end waste of cash I would be able to stop there and not fret about the larger implications, but it isn’t, so fret I will. The next waste of cash is my sexy, brand new Jetta… It’s issue? The digital clock in the dash is slow… Like, really slow, (two minutes a day).

Now, the last I checked, digital clocks are not very hard to make accurate. I mean, the Chinese guys on the subway who sell them for $.63 would probably agree with me. But I guess VW had to cut corners on the Jetta to meet budget constraints (and if they’re cutting corners in Germany we are all in trouble).

Next up… Windows Vista. What can I say? Yikes, that thing stinks. Here’s my equation for the pricing of that thing. (If Quality = Price, than Price = $23.99)

And finally we arrive at my doorknobs. You see my wife and wanted our new apt. to be rockin’, so we went to Home Depot where I said to her, “F$#% it! Let’s get the nice door knobs. Sure it’s a monumental waste of money at $70.00 a pop. But quality door hardware is always worth it. We’ll be turning these things until we’re wrinkled and dumb.” She smiled at me, grabbed five of them, and said, “It’s the little things, that make a home.” It was a very magical moment.

Take a look at these bad boys. They are sweeeeeet.

Then low and behold, after about a month they started falling apart. Total junk. Glued on glass, loose fittings, and sticky mechanisms… Total shite, just like the $800.00 phone. So where does this leave us? My friends it’s time we speak out. Sure there are about 77,992 better topics worth protesting these days, but screw all them. I call for a quality uprising. I want you all to stand up from your desks right now. Get up and go over to the window (if you’re in an office building, smash something through the glass) and scream, “I want to spend my money, and I want to spend it on something that doesn’t suck!” (I’ll have the PR dept. work up a better slogan, but they’re all on line waiting to get their copies of Halo 3 right now)So rise up and take to the streets, in your poorly made sneakers and march behind Captain Cellfish’s sweatshop sewn banner. Because if we’re not careful we’ll look back on the crap products of today and wish life was that good.

Well, here at Cellfish we believe in quality over price, that is why our site is free to join, and we make quality video products for your enjoyment. And I’ll tell you this. You can watch this next video over and over and it won’t ever break. So enjoy our over sexed librarian, Ms. Bosworth…

- Captain Cellfish
Inspector 12 - Fruit of the Loom

Captain Cellfish is not a hippy. Captain Cellfish does however enjoy peace, but he does not write it on his forehead. He doesn’t really write anything on his forehead at all. (Except for when Captain Cellfish gets blackout drunk at company parties and passes out in the coat check room and other Cellfishers write things on his forehead, but that is besides the point) Captain Cellfish enjoys a certain level of violence from time to time. He is not opposed to a good action sequence. But something has gone terribly wrong. Something must be done.

With the release of the new Motorola Razr 2 a trend is emerging. Cellphone companies seem to want us to use our phones to slice each other up, like wandering samurai in the 18th century ,Japanese countryside. Here’s the problem. You can’t sharpen your phone, nor can you stab someone with it. And any commercial that says you can is lying. Why, just last week as I was getting off the subway in Brooklyn and I tried to slash a sexy brunette with my cellphone. Unfortunately her clothes did not peel off, but she did spray my face, eyes, mouth and head area with pepper spray.

I considered suing Motorola for false advertising, but our society is litigious enough as is. But these people really should be ashamed for making such a stupid ad.

Okay so if you will bare with me I’d like to de-construct this incredible piece of Ad dollars hard at work.

1. Cellphones don’t ever work in subways, so this guy must be on mescaline and hallucinating his butt off.
2. Any two people that wear that much black either work at an art gallery, or are on their way to audition for The Matrix (the musical). Neither of those two categories of people are qualified for a knife fight (more over a cellphone blade fight).
3. Lady is obviously on her way to said Matrix audition because of the blatant Matrix rip-off, kung-fu “come hither” move, which I might add wasn’t even really that fresh in the movie.
4. The idea that the Motorola Razr2, if used correctly, will get models to strip off their clothes insults my (very limited) intelligence.
5. When dude’s sleeves get cut off I can’t help but think that is a shout out to the “Beat It” video, and frankly, I would much rather be watching those professional toothpick chewers dancing out their aggression in their musty warehouse.
6. The fact that home boy takes a snap shot of the femme fatal as he dips her is just ludicrous. What kind of a fight is this? What reality are we in? Oh yeah, we’re in cellphone, battle land where models do a slice and dice tango to illuminate exactly how fresh this phone is. What’s going on? Someone help me out here.
7. I guess the guy wins, but only because he gets the ability to finally prove exactly how sharp this phone is by chucking it at a wall.I’ll tell you what I would like to chuck at a wall. The numb-skulls who made this ad.

The Samsung Blade, the Sanyo Katana, the sidekick. The Nokia Glock. The Radio Shack Slingshot. The LG WMD. I think these companies are trying to tell us something. Soon you’re gonna see NRA bumper stickers saying, “Cellphones don’t kill… People do.” & “My Treo is protected under the constitution!” But, my friends Cellphones are not weapons. They are phones. So let’s all just get along and use our phones as forces of good.

This is more like it.

- Captain Cellfish
Kent State Protester
(I got gravel in my eye, missed most of the shooting)

Breaking Mobile News

Dateline Cuppertino, California

Apple CEO, Steve Jobs has just announced that Micky D’s ( Le Chateau du Ronald ) will be giving away the beloved iPhone with any purchase of a happy meal.

The promotion was announced by Jobs as he was online to see the Nanny Diaries at the mall. He was quoted as saying, “Let’s see Nokia and Motorola keep up with our sales now, bitc%!@!” Customers who paid the whopping (not whopper) original $600.00 price for the phone were outraged and not at all appeased by Apple’s offer to throw in a small fries for their troubles. Those that went for the promotional offer and got the iPhone with their happy meals seemed surprisingly nonplussed. Selma Roberts of Orem, Utah said, “Yeah whatever, I got the Happy Meal iPhone, but it had BBQ sauce on it, so I just chucked it.”Go ask the Fake Steve Jobs about it. He’ll tell you the whole deal.

Okay, okay enough tomfoolery here. Seriously, what is going on in the mobile world these days. Working in a mobile entertainment company it feels a bit like that scene from Ghostbusters where the D-bag throws the switch on the containment system and all hell breaks loose. Yes, that is exactly what it is like. “Cats and dogs sleeping together, Mass hysteria!” We need some pajama clad, comic geniuses to come in here and save the day. What a business we are in. It’s no wonder Mr. Jobs is sick of the cellphone business.

Today I was just told that my co-worker is in the doghouse because he bought his girlfriend an iPhone. “Why?” I asked. Well it seems the iPhone may have lowered it’s price, but you have to pay out of the rear to text message. I think it was $30.00 a month for 1,500 messages (there is no plan between 200 messages and 1,500). And then there are those stories of innocent Americans traveling in Europe racking up $3,000.00 roaming charges.

Madness, madness I tell you. Then the best part of the whole thing was the iHack.

George Hotz, a kid from New Joisey made Apple’s stock jump 3% by ripping open his iPhone and making it work on a new carrier. Wow. These are crazy times. The kid is now a college freshman, and a very famous one at that. I mean how’s this for a pick up line at your 1st kegger, “hey I made Apple 2 billion dollars 2 weeks ago with a soldering iron and some silly putty. Imagine what I could do to you.”

Here’s what I say. Let’s all stop panicking. Let’s make cellphones cheaper and easier to use, not harder and more expensive. Knocking off a couple hundred, and keeping exorbitant data rates is just insane. Let’s look to those search guys, we all love so much… What’s their name? Google I think it is. Those cats know what they’re doing.

Free video, free maps, free analytics, free home page, free muffins, free love. They have it down. That’s how you go from being a noun to being a verb. You give it away. Then everyone will need you. So this goes out to big brother Stevie Jobs, and Uncle Nokia, Auntie Motorola, you too. Oh and grandma AT&T, cousin Verizon, weird neighbor Sprint, and good-old, blind, toothless T-Mobile how could we forget you? If you’re listening, and I hope you are. Make it just all so very darned easy. Let the people use their camera phones and send their pictures out without having to cash in their 401k’s. Let your users enjoy the products you made for them. It will only make them want to use them more. It’s all cake to you anyway, what’s the difference?

- Captian Cellfish
Open House School, Teacher 3’s & 4’s

So, as I was working diligently here in my cave, I received an electronic correspondence, (I think the kids today call them E-mails) In this email was a quote from the newly published, Ronald Regan Diaries.

The entry is dated May 17, 1986.

‘A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.’

My 1st reaction was to scream, “priceless!” and then launch into a series of controlled guffaws. I quickly Apple-C’d the text, then opened up 20 IM windows and Apple-V’d like a replicating amoeba. Soon digital guffawing emoticons were “LOL-ing” all over my screen. I had done it! I had achieved that all too rare feeling of being the Typhoid Mary of a viral tid-bit of hilarity. No one had seen it, read it, heard of it, or was able to verify it.

After spreading that quote to the four corners of my small, (and decidedly whack) social circle I started looking into it (like any responsible web poster would, spread the rumor 1st then check for facts) Not surprisingly, I found all sorts of people who had done the same as me.

Metadish

Suzi on Gather.com

Democratic Underground

Yet Another Blog

Boy, it can be fun to be first. Be that revolutionary Paul Revere of the web. “The Funny is coming! The funny is coming” My horse’s trusty thundering digital hoofs pounding away with each keystroke, “One if by YouTube, two if by Blogger!”

But alas, my friends it was all for naught. It’s a fake. A little trick played on us all. Not real. Just real genius. The quotation is pulled from an article titled “My Lunch with Reagan” by Michael Kinsley in the New Republic. Read all about it at Global Research.

But here’s the thing. It was sort of real. It was real to all those people I sent it to (who i never told that it was fake btw). It was real to the person who sent it to me and to everyone else who fell for it.

What’s the quote? A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

So this incident begs the question, is there any difference between real and real genius? I give this query to you my readers. Please do feel free to send me any other “real” tricks that were played on the web public. I’d like to compile a list.

Now as this is the Cellfish blog I will now relate this back to my mission. My wheelhouse, if you will. Mobile entertainment. I can hear you all now (all six of you) saying, “okay here’s where the Cap’n goes down with the ship.”

I shant go down! And here’s why. In a time where there are 1 billion camera phones in operation everyday, there are a whole lot of images floating around out there, and if you think separating truth from lies is hard now, oh Nelly, just you wait. But as long as we have people who have the desire to be first, there will be the person who wants to be first to discredit something.

So good people, arm yourselves with your camera phones and find the best fake stories out there. Make us prove you wrong. Shoot them, blast them out to our site and let the games begin.

I leave you with a genuine clip of last year’s state of the union.

-Captain Cellfish
Fashion Editor, London Times