I do love living in the age of instantaneous self acknowledgment and gratification. There are myriad and mass perks to being alive right at this very moment. The last month and a half of my life, for instance, has been spent pointing my cell phone at random objects and having the device offer a glut of useless information regarding whatever I was looking at. At some point, I did get tired of pointing the phone at trees and having the braniac inform me “That’s a tree.” I got punched in the head after scanning some Chicago Cubs fan and telling him that the phone came up with Google search results for ‘fat suits’ and ‘beard diapers’.  The instant feedback age is full of good and entertaining (albeit useless) advances. Many that don’t result in my getting beat up, in fact. One example is I Write Like.

Leafing through a newspaper the other day I happened to see a general interest story about I Write Like (http://www.iwl.me/), a site that is purported to instantly analyze your particular writing style and compare it to a famous author’s work. Granted, I heard about this through the local paper, just moments before I made a hat from it and ran into the yard shouting “Arrrrr.” I honestly didn’t know what else to do with the thing. When I came back indoors, news hat ruined, I started to wonder about the whole I Write Like idea. What famous person’s written oeuvre does my work resemble? Martha Stewart, maybe. I do use the term ‘patina’ a lot. There’s Ernest Hemingway. Not the famous one (that’s too much self-flattery), but the guy who details cars down the street from me. He’s a prolific writer and a bathroom wall limerick legend. I made the mistake of clicking onto iwritelike.com, an ad site that tells every respondent their writing is a subconscious effort to mimic Chuck Norris. You can actually submit nothing at all and get the same result. Now, I sat and watched one of Chuck’s ’70′s (eh hem) classics recently and can honestly say that no one is trying on any level to write in the style of Chuck Norris. In the movie I watched, Chuckles journeys to a town run by a corpulent, drunken mayor in order to save his brother from the local muscle. Norris, in his unique way, manages to bed a waitress after she serves him coffee. If Norris had anything to do with the writing of that film then I know for sure that I’m not attempting his writing style.

After submitting two samples from this blog to the real I Write Like, the results were that my writing resembles that of Cory Doctrow and H.P. Lovecraft. Neither of the styles these two gentleman became famous for is reassuring in any way and I may as well quit writing this instant (Amen!). H.P. Lovecraft, was not a home computer designed for use by couples, but the author of necromantic science fiction until his death in 1937. Doctrow is a blogger and science fiction author from Canada. I decided to try a third, independent test and submitted someone else’s writing from an adult site. The poorly written, very misspelled piece of literature was analyzed and the result came back J.D. Salinger. So much for instant literary analysis. The I Write site is operated by Russian software programmer  Dmitry Chestnykh and is a lot of fun, but not exactly serious critique. For laugh’s, The Christian Science Monitor recommends submitting your work to I Actually Write Like. I submitted my first sample again and got the following: “You Actually Write Like A Moonstruck Lunatic Possibly Wearing A Straightjacket.” Oh, thank heavens for that. Next to that subtle hint was an illustrated pile of feces. There you have it. Technological gratification.

Years ago, I remember a psych professor telling me about a University of Kansas study in which researchers placed cameras on overpasses to see what drivers might be engaged in while they were supposed to be driving. The most common behavior, it turned out, was nose picking.  I can only laugh at what the second might have been. Now, those scientists of a generation ago would see Kansans trying to jam iphones up their flared nostrils and send texts at the same time. Sadly, the quaint world has passed away and boogers don’t kill us anymore, phones do. Last year the worry was about the number of people killed while texting and stepping off of curbs into traffic, now it’s driving related fatalities from texting. I believe that the next frontier of text related deaths might be from auto erotic texting. Insensitive? Sure, but you watch. Some dope will probably make national headlines for text related death with a bag over his head, a smile on his face and a phone in whatever hand is free.

In all seriousness, I’m with the Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board, who wrote an op-ed piece today calling for a nationwide ban on hand held use of cell phones in vehicles (http://csmonitor.com). It just makes sense. You really can’t do anything while driving, but drive. The age we live in dictates that we “nothingtask” all day long. Yes, it looks on the surface like we’re multi-tasking and getting many things done on divergent fronts, but this tends to be a fallacy. The more things a person tries to do at once, the more diluted the results of the tasks become. We end up doing multiple bits of nothing. I can eat a double Whopper, write a shorthand novel, critique paintings of dogs playing poker and text about how much I like Jennifer Aniston’s looks at forty, but you sure as hell don’t want to be anywhere near my car while I’m doing so. The Whopper is on my shirt, the novel is crap, I end up texting about Jenny Craig and (more than likely) smash a texter stepping off the curb. The thing for all of us, myself (bad driving, cell phone using) included may be to go back and watch all of those butt kicking, impossibly gory driver’s ed films again. Just the memory of the kid running into the back of the dump truck in I Am Your License is enough to make me put down the phone and concentrate. The scene in Blood on the Asphalt where the 50′s era kid with the fence post through his noggin still gives me the chills more than any slasher movie ever did. You know what? Time for a dose of youtube and then I’ll leave the phone in my bag.

Christian Science Monitor contributor Marshall Blonsky posted an article today about the effects of viewing too many currently running advertisements. In the piece, Blonsky devoted a lot of cyber ink to my favorite pitch woman (you guessed it) Progressive Flo. I feel a bit vindicated knowing that after all of these months I am not the only person annoyed by the car insurance campaign and it’s creepy spokes…whatever she is. Blonsky writes of her as being like a “loony private nurse” in Progressive’s big auto insurance hospital and that her euphoric corruption/co-option of the sixties slogan Power To The People makes him want to put duct tape over her “blabbering mouth.” All I could think of the first time I saw her limp wristed empowerment gesture was that John Lennon is probably rolling over in his urn.

Lennon would probably be rolling on a lot of the wussification of modern man. We live in the age of generic man. I am he and he is me and we are all together. The guy in Flo’s Power To The People spot, as mentioned by Blonsky, is representative of what guys are supposed to be right now. We wear dopey suburban camo (blue sport shirts, khaki Dockers) and are befuddled by the simplest of things. Car insurance? How do I buy that? Hopefully some wise woman in white will make sense of it for me. She does, after all, have a big, tricked out name tag. We have Low T, apparently ( I used to dance, but thanks to low testosterone I just stand around befuddled). We used to have relationships, but now we’ll settle for a bathtub on a mountain top (if I have anything lasting more than four hours I’m going to Twitter the whole time). We used to watch baseball, now we just have to pee. Wait a second. Have the copy writers at FloMaxs’ ad agency actually watched baseball? An average game is 36 hours. I’m writing this 27 hours after President Obama threw out the first pitch at the All-Star game and I think it’s only in the sixth inning. Power to the People nothing. Welcome to the 1950′s part two, where men are painted as hapless sort of dolts who need women to help them with everything. I laugh every time I see the Just For Men spot in which the middle aged dunce can’t get a job until his teen aged daughter fixes his tie, colors his gray hair and shoves his butt out the door. I always wonder if when he got to the interview they didn’t say “nice dye job, guy.” Thank heavens for TV women to set us straight and make our lives simpler. Catch Blonsky’s piece at http://csmonitor.com