Between setting up the new phone and living some of my regular existence (sadly, once again missing the Sunday Farmers’ Market down the street), I’ve been thinking about the hype machine that is Apple marketing and leaving Boston.

I’ve been carrying a couple of cell phone numbers, but only using one phone, my Sidekick. My original Sidekick 2 was suffering button sticks and weird flakiness, so I had upgraded to a Sidekick 3. The Sidekick 3 had an unfortunate bump when it slid out of my messenger bag onto the floor of the work garage and got nudged by a rolling car tire. I had been using it until the cracking of the LCD display spread into a web of splintering glass kaleidoscope.

The second number was my original Boston cell phone number. I was loathe to give it up, but I couldn’t transfer it to a California number what with all of my living being done here and all. The time had come. I’ve let 617.

Completely unrelatedly, but kind of reassuringly, I read a couple of weblogs from some Boston-based “comedians.” The quotes are really only for one of them. One is, indeed, a certifiable comic, the other is a weird, angry man who blusters on stage in a manner that’s meant to seem dangerous. I was first introduced to him as some kind of comic rebel, truthteller who drank and smoke without remorse.

He always struck me as the know-it-all geek who realized, when his acne cleared up and he let his hair grow a bit more stylish, he could upon occasion get laid. I found him more sad and desperate than honest, not funny, and the rebel boozer persona past, say, the age of 25 is fucking boring. (As a complete tangent, he has one of the least funny, least attractive (inside and out) comedy girl girlfriends I have ever met.)

Anywho, both comics (and I’m sure more), weighed in on the web with the name-calling of anyone sorry enough to lay money down on Steve Jobs’ latest toy. Apparently, I am a spineless, drooling, mouth-breather unable to discern mass manipulation.

Thank fucking god there are geniuses out there setting us mindless masses straight.

Thing is, reading this shit reminded me of a peculiar type of behavior that I will always and forever associate with my home-town state of Massachusetts. My uncle Jerry told me once it was among the reasons he left Boston himself, and tied it to a not-so-fine Irish tradition of begrudgery.

I think begrudgery is more or less defined as the compulsion to prick negatively at the successful, bringing up their less glamorous past or suggesting their path to a better life was not as it seems. My uncle’s experience was people undercutting his legal career, culminating in being a judge, as a product of luck and gladhanding, rather than maybe understanding the law.

I think there’s a Boston flavor of not just bringing down the successful, but generally shitting on anyone else’s sense of fun. Apparently there’s joy in deflating that which yanks someone else’s crank.

It’s not a California thing. Leaving it makes it kind of conspicuous by its absence in my life.

I know for sure, sometimes folks here are just blowing smoke up my ass or wind in my skirts or some other kind of fake breeze effect, but phony nice is more pleasant than the grind of griping. A Boston comedy club became a special depressing hell for me by the time I left, with a few bright spots that were my exceptions that proved the rule. Too much emphasis on others’ success and the snarky stabbing takes a toll.

I’m not perfect, mind you. I enjoy bitching about folks as much as the next miserable human. I gererally, though, don’t believe myself so lofty an authority on all things and all people. I’m fucking humble that way.

A lengthy, long-winded preamble to my opinion on the hype. Yup, no bones about it, Steve Jobs is a marketeer. From day one Apple was about packaging and style and form following function and changing function to follow how people work. It’s not a magic scheme, it’s design and capitalism. I totally grok that. ‘Splaining it to me, as the detractors have spent some time doing all over the fucking web, is just condescending.

It pretty much works just like on the TV, though.

A computer is a tool. And fuck me, but I like using tools that feel good in my hand. I own a fairly pricey power sander, which I was I used when I stripped some turn of the century wainscotting down to it’s original, varnished gum wood. Am I victim of the fancy display at the hardware store and the slippery admen of Porter-Cable?