It is tempting to state, matter-of-factly, that I went to the mall this weekend. But I fear that my submission of such a statement might mislead you into envisioning me within the confines of a vast, space-saving building packed full of commerce and its associated enterprises. Let me clear up your preconceived notions by telling you that when I say mall, you can go ahead and fill in the finger-curling air quotes around that word and take it to mean “A sad, pathetic excuse for a shopping center which features perhaps three stores of any interest, our one movie theater, the World’s Smallest Food Court and 9,647 cell phone peddlers in kiosk locations whose sole purpose is apparently to verbally accost anyone entering the state lines, browbeating them into a variety of two- or three-year contracts, even if they already own several cellular phones.”

I’m not saying I hate our “mall,” I’m just saying if given the choice between having an amateur appendectomy and shopping there, I’d probably have to ask how long I could get out of work before making an informed decision.

At one point Nik turned to me and said, “They’re having a sale on jeans at Old Navy. Two pairs for forty bucks.”

“Isn’t it ‘two pair‘ for forty bucks?”

“That’s what I said,” she replied, curling her lip a bit the way she does when she thinks I’m being dumb. I see that look a lot. “Forty bucks.”

“No,” I said, “You said ‘two pairs‘. But ‘pair’ is already plural. You don’t need to add the ‘s’.”

In addition to the lip-curly thing, she also has this very blank expression with lowered eyelids and a slight tightening of the corners of her mouth. I means, “You are the biggest dork ever.” I get that look with alarming regularity.

“Nevermind,” I added hastily.

Here’s the thing about Old Navy: You can’t beat their prices. I mean, I guess you could go to a secondhand store and wear someone else’s pants, but typically I reserve that sort of thing for metaphorical realms. The problem, of course, is that you get what you pay for which, in this case, is $20 worth of sweatshop-produced poop carefully shaped by tiny, exhausted hands to look more or less like britches. The magic of this illusion is that right up until the moment you place these paragons of duplicity into the washing machine, or any body of water for that matter, they seem like the Best Deal Ever.

Of course, after that initial washing they dissolve not entirely unlike the Wicked Witch of the West did in The Wizard of Oz. If you listen carefully you can even hear them emit tiny, pained little shrieks of misery. “What a world! What a world!” Et cetera.

Yet I keep going back, hoping in vain that this time, what I purchase won’t dissolve upon contact with Earth’s atmosphere (I’m actually looking in to a theory I have which suggests that Old Navy stores emit a specialized kind of holographic ray, or possibly they pump hallucinogens into their air circulator which would suggest that Old Navy pants do not exist at all but are instead entirely fabricated as cruel jokes designed to drain your wallet. I’ll let you know what my investigation uncovers).

As I wandered the store, glaring bitterly at the signs posted everywhere declaring the profoundly reduced prices and already fighting my internal war between Mr. Cheapskate and Mr. I’m-Nobody’s-Fool. These two guys live inside me and they quarrel constantly. Like when I see a sale at the grocery store which says, “Buy 1, Get 1 Free.” Mr. Cheapskate instantly goes, “Yeah, we gotta get that.” Mr. INF waits until I’ve reached for the second item before piping up, “Uh, do we really need this? I mean, you’re not just going to buy this because it’s on sale, are you? Because that’s how the Man wants you to shop.”

Mr. Cheapskate is fairly proud, and hates when Mr. INF is right. But sometimes there will be a retort: “Yes, but we were going to buy this anyway, and now we get a second one, free!” Mr. INF calmly replies, “Were we planning on buying two?”

“No…” Mr. Cheapskate says, suspiciously.

“Well then why are we buying more than we need? Buy one, get one free is just another way of saying ‘50% Off,’ so we might as well just get the one at half price we were going to get and not buy something we’re just going to throw away because it sounded like it might be ‘free.'” Mr. INF is very sarcastic.

Usually, Mr. Cheapskate has to concede that paying half price is better than paying full price, even if you end up with less, but he typically isn’t too happy about it. In this case however, there were strict rules for the buying of pants, which detailed plainly that while two pair(s) of pants were $40, one pair of pants was $27.00. The indication of the signage seemed to make it abundantly clear that only a single-celled organism would ever consider not buying pants in even numbers.

And despite Mr. I’m-Nobody’s-Fool screaming in my head, I actually considered purchasing some Old Navy jeans. What eventually stopped me was that their jeans aren’t just of dubious quality, but they look bad, too. I mean, what’s up with this whole “dirty jeans” look they have going on? You know, where the blue has some dingy brown-grey color mixed in so they look like jeans that someone wore camping for a week? What is that? Listen, if I wanted to wear dirty jeans, I can just wear the jeans I already have. I’m a clumsy guy: I spill a lot. Also, I’m not that tidy of a person in general so (and this may be far more information than you ever wanted) there is roughly a one-in-three chance that any time you meet me, I’m wearing pants that could have—or maybe should have—been washed already, but haven’t been. What I certainly don’t need is to pay money for pants that I didn’t even get dirty myself.

So I grumbled and complained and griped until Nikki finally stalked out of the store, exasperated. “You hate everything!” she cried. “You just can’t stand shopping! Fine, then. Next time, just tell me your size and I’ll pick your stupid pants out!”

I considered this for a long moment. “Yeah, but I’m picky, too. You’d have to get pants that I’d like.”

If irritation were tangible, like sweat, it would have been gushing from her pores. “You… hate… everything,” she said, and her fingers clenched and twitched in a way that made me think she was imagining my throat between them. I backed away a few steps.

“Well, yeah. But if people just made normal pants that didn’t suck, it wouldn’t be such a problem,” I grumbled.

After a moment of uncomfortable glaring, her shoulders drooped, and she sighed, defeated. “Yeah. That’s the problem,” was all she said. I’m pretty sure it was smarter of me not to ask.

Apple Pie

• The New York Times reports that record labels are greedy (BugMeNot required). Shocking of a development as that is, what it means for Apple is that they’re starting to whinge about the flat $0.99 rate iTunes has rocked since the beginning. Instead they favor a more complicated staggered pricing scheme where popular stuff (like the latest Hillary Duff poo-bomb) would be more like $1.50 and older stuff might even drop below the $0.99 point.
  I’m kind of torn because while I really don’t see anything going below $0.99, if it did that would be killer, but I kinda don’t see that happening. And I’m really not that concerned if “popular” stuff gets expensive, because I don’t buy much/any of that as it is. (Well, I guess you could count stuff like Coldplay as popular, so maybe it would affect me…)
  But it’s easier to envision them just raising the prices all around so an album ends up costing $12-$14. If that happens my incentive for buying online decreases since I can grab used CDs for way less than that (about $8.00 on average) and even though they’re used, it’s worth it for about five bucks in savings. And that’s not too cool since I actually really like buying online; it’s easy, it’s cheap and it’s much more likely to have something I want than a used record store which may or may not have much of anything. Plus I can listen to clips of the songs, which helps immensely.
• This is kind of tangental, but I just have to point out that there is still a glaring flaw in iTunes which needs desperately to be fixed which is that if I purchase a single from an album (or more specifically several singles), then if I decide the whole album is then worth my money I shouldn’t have to purchase those same tracks again. I understand that this means all songs would have to have a “single price” and an “album price” but here’s what I’m thinking: What if the single price were flexible and based on an algorithm that measured popularity (number of purchases/downloads) to raise the price to a specific cap? The lowest possible price would be the album price ($x divided by y where x is the cost of the full album and y is the number of tracks for simplicity’s sake, or something more complex that also factors in popularity) and once the song was no longer being purchased like crazy due to popularity it would dip back down toward the album price.
  Eventually most catalog titles would be pretty cheap for one-offs, or you could simply buy albums piecemeal, without taking a hit for trying stuff out. People would be encouraged to find stuff that wasn’t mainstream (because it would be cheaper) and those who really just wanted to be part of the crowd would either have to fork over the single price (supply and demand, baby) or take the plunge on the whole album. I’m just saying.
• Afterglow comes up with an intriguing new idea for the Desktop/Finder and I think he’s on the right track. One problem I see is that he seems to be kind of relying on the Dock being at the bottom and I prefer to keep mine on the left. I find that it gets in the way less over there (at the bottom on my 14″ iBook it makes me scroll more, especially when I’m editing already-too-big image files in Fireworks or Illustrator and on the right it gets in the way of my scrollbar(s)). I’m also not sure about the Clipboard thing, that sounds more like a Widget to me. Having used the clipboard manager in XP (which makes me insane, by the way, since in theory it’s a good idea but it always pops up when I don’t want it to… almost like there needs to be a new copy or cut command like CTRL-SHFT-X/C that copies or cuts and saves) I can say that it’s sorta useful, but not so much so that it needs to be a highlighted feature unless there was an easy way to access the clipboard history through shortcuts. I really don’t usually care to see what’s on the clipboard, I just want to be able to get it.
• Drunkenbatman rants about GTalk in a way that makes a lot of sense. I mentioned before that the only surprising thing about GTalk was that it was completely lacking anything remarkable. But the article suggests that the other IM providers are taking GTalk very seriously and so much so that they may soon start taking drastic measures to prevent Google from running them out of town, even if the chances of that happening are significantly higher in their heads than in reality.
  I actually think the article downplays the extent to which the other IM guys bailing out support for older clients could be exactly what Google is hoping for: If everyone has to upgrade anyway and no one’s multi-protocol apps work anymore, why don’t we all just switch to GTalk and forget these other jokers? I myself honestly could care less which IM protocol ends up winning, and I’d certainly be happiest if it were something open (like Jabber), but I really just want something to step up and clear out some of this cruft. I’d be much happier using AIM/iChat all day, but I have too many people who use Yahoo! or MSN exclusively to just abandon them so I deal with the questionable interface and weird status states of Adium (for whatever reason the “Automatically Reconnect at Logon” option doesn’t seem to apply to dropped connections, just re-launching the app) for the sake of communication.
  On the other hand, if AIM, MSN and Yahoo! got together and created a protocol to compete with Jabber/GTalk and closed it off saying, “From now on you can use whichever app you want and you can talk to anyone from all three networks and we’ll just compete based on client featureset” they could effectively kill GTalk before it even takes off, make multi-protocol apps obsolete and render Jabber another one of those funky hacker-alts like Ogg Vorbis that exists for the freedom freaks but is so far below everyone else’s radar that it might as well not exist.
• I’m not really suggesting anything by this, but I found a P2P app for OS X that connects to multiple networks called Poisoned. And if you were to download something like this, I know you’d only use it legally and for the greater good of man. Right?

This. That. There is no ‘Other Thing’ Today, Though

• I found a blog by an Israeli woman who has some informed and interesting opinions about the ongoing struggles of the Jewish nation. You should read it. You might learn something.
• For the language dorks out there (and I know I’m not alone), there’s a nice series of articles covering some of the stranger nuances of the English language called the Language Corner. The newest entry covers the use of “that” versus “which.” I guess I write like a Brit since I tend to use “which” about every other word. Which reminds me…
• Has anyone read the book Wicked, or seen the musical? The premise sounds interesting, but I want to know if it’s worth it to check either out.