Before I start my regularly scheduled humor post, I want to put everything thing out on the table. I feel no reason to hide the fact that Jeff Bridges has a country album. Nor should Jeff feel any shame in joining the musical actor ranks of William Shanter, Joe Pesci, and my personal favorite Leonard Nimoy (mainly because of the epic musical masterpiece: “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”). Which of course, I found for your viewing pleasure:
Is this what you want Jeff Bridges? Really?
Now that Jeff’s musicality is out in the open, I am really here to write about Tron: Legacy. I watched the movie last night and somehow was transported back to the nineties. Most would view the next installment of Tron as a nostalgic romp into the eighties. They wouldn’t really be wrong because of the scenic eighties “Space Paranoids”. Visual effects aside, I found the rhetoric of the movie more on the lines of Antitrust.
For those that remember the late nineties and early aughts, Microsoft was a big scary evil empire that would one day rule the world. Of course when air traffic control software starts using Windows, count me out of flying on planes. I think I’ll walk. The movie Antitrust was basically fueled by fear of Microsoft getting too big. Tim Robbins even played a billionaire, who was a surrogate for Bill Gates that would murder to ensure his software control.
During the time Antitrust, if you didn’t want to mess with installing Linux but still wanted to “stick it to the man”, you could always get a Mac. The funny idea behind Tron: Legacy is that Mac is in the position of the evil empire. Just like Tim Robbins was unmistakeable for Bill Gates, the evil empire in Tron: Legacy is releasing… drum roll… OS12… No… Not OS12!! How could you!
Essentially, Apple now gets to have a spot in the evil empire chair. The critics of Apple would of course say they are evil because they create the walled garden (Everything works great until you want content outside of the garden). My wife loves them because they always run well and she doesn’t really want anything outside the wall anyway. But whether you love or hate them, they worked hard to be in that evil empire chair and deserve some credit.
People don’t realize that building a evil empire, hellbent on taking over the world, takes a lot of hard work. It’s not just a simple of matter of building a product that people buy. There are plenty of officials to bribe, child labor to exploit, and third world countries to rape. Evil isn’t a matter of waking up one morning and deciding to be evil.
Steve Jobs: Let’s do something different. I bored of creating tech giants.
Bill Gates: Like what?
SJ: Let’s eat a baby.
BG: I better stop donating all this money to charity. Tabasco or Mustard?
Evil is a lot of hard work. To create a conglomerate that will dominate the globe, takes dedication. First, you have to create software that uses Bluetooth to rewrite people’s brain waves. Then you have to create a phone that pleases everybody (If you’ve done that, I’ll file those patents for you…). Finally, you have to oversee the planet. Ruling the United States is hard enough but the world? Think about Obama’s job. Imagine being handed a giant pile of shit. Then every will criticize you when that shit doesn’t smell nice. You can sculpt it anyway you want but it’s still shit.
I’d imagine creating software that gives you billions of dollars is good enough. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can bath Scrooge McDuck style in a swimming pool of money. I’d think they would have better things to do than that global domination plan… with a vast evilness that is so dastardly, they call it…. OS12!! Noooo! Not OS12!
On a final note, Tron no longer fights for the users. He fights for Jeff Bridges. Tron likes country music. So shut up!
Time Burrito 