The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

This is a profoundly geeky thing to blog about, but perhaps it will widen my fan base to include online gamers and Wikipedians, my most neglected demographic.

Web 2.0 guru Clay Shirky recently published a book entitled Here Comes Everybody. I am dying to read this book due to the persuasive strength of “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” a talk the author gave at a nerd conference last week.

Shirky believes that modern society functions with a massive cognitive surplus, a surplus we primarily devote to drinking liquor and watching TV. But recently Web 2.0 - the gospel of society’s consuming, producing, and sharing information instead of just idly absorbing it - has engaged this cognitive surplus in a more worthwhile way. Now people can devote millions of hours to debating the planetary integrity of Pluto on the internet, whereas 15 years ago those same hours would have been spent on sitcom reruns.

This, believe it or not, is progress. Information is becoming more inclusive than exclusive, more interactive than inactive, more loving sex partner than life-size blow-up doll. But we can still lament the ’90s brain drain of thousands of MTV hours, time that I could have passed blogging, or that you could have passed reading and commenting on my blog.

Congratulations to the brains behind the presumably fake Frrvrr.com.

Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles. Frrvrr then directs you to those topics and connects you with similar-minded people.

It’s enough to strike fear into the heart of every web surfer.

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

No one wants to look into that mirror. Frrvrr is the absurd conclusion to the booming personalization business. Technology will know you better than you know yourself. You’re not surprising anyone with your love for awfulplasticsurgery.com. That love was mapped out years ago when your web surfing algorithm incorporated your encrypted medical records. And incidentally, we think you’re gay.

In the tradition of ripping off McSweeney’s, here is a list of things I’m digging lately.

1. The movie Charlie Bartlett. It’s a little overly neat, but there’s nothing wrong with an hour and a half of poetic justice. It’s a charming film about a quirky high schooler, but it made my day like Juno didn’t. It’s funny and heartwarming, it’s got Robert Downey Jr. in it, and the kids actually act like kids for the most part. Gustin Nash, the film’s writer, is also adapting Youth in Revolt. I can’t wait.

2. This New Republic review of What Is the What by Dave Eggers. When culture critics mourn the death of the book review, I want to direct them to this fine piece of writing.

3. Bananas. They are so good. I must have a potassium deficiency.

4. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This FX show got so little publicity and so few viewers in its first season that the producers had to recruit Danny Devito in order to raise its celebrity quotient. Danny Devito. But it turns out he’s hilarious. Why isn’t Devito in more stuff? I think It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia will do for Devito’s career what Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta’s.

5. Taking out the compost.

5. My new C.L.A.W. t-shirt, designed by Thomas Dean. Get ‘em while they’re hot. Next arm wrestling match is March 11th at the Blue Moon Diner.

6. Being off the sauce. It’s really not so bad once you get used to it. Last night I craved a margarita, but I just ate five pounds of tortilla chips instead. Alcohol has been one of my biggest expenses, and I am now free to spend this month’s savings on dental bills and car insurance payments. It’s a sumptuous reward for all my hard work.

7. Good & Plenty’s. Because I have a lot of siblings, I quickly learned to love relatively unpopular candies like licorice and Necco Wafers. This way, no one would get into my stash. I know it’s a Machiavellian tactic, but Catholics have to find some way to get ahead in their families.