That's how it's looking this morning. Our first stop is with Info-Fascist Bill Gates, who unveiled designs for his new Fossil Watch at a trade show today.

The Fossil Watch continues a tradition of hi-tech obsolescence and reflects this in its name. You can see at left that Gates, who appears to be wearing the new ultra-portable PDA, actually has a Twinkie wrapper wound about his wrist. It's the thought that counts. We caught up with Mr. Windows and asked him about it.

The Raven: Bill, we were wondering if you could tell us a bit more about your new watch.

Bill Gates: It's the next level of convergence, Raven. Your Fossil will be able to show you weather information—our flagship software for the product.

The Raven: Yeah, but if you're wearing it, then you could theoretically just look up and check the weather yourself.

Bill Gates: That's an analog solution, and it would void your warranty. Fossil can display text information, too.

The Raven: Like e-mail?

Bill Gates: No, because you've got a data-input issue there, and the screen's too small. But it will have instant-messaging capability—that was an original parameter.

The Raven: How is an instant message different from e-mail?

Bill Gates: Well, there's a lot of different ways to send e-mail, like Eudora, Unix, or Linux-based programs that do that. But Fossil only responds to IE Instant Messaging, adding even more value to the product.

The Raven: Adding more... OK, gotcha. Hey, about that subscription deal—

Bill Gates: We haven't decided on a price, but we're looking in the $12-a-month range.

The Raven: A subscription-fee watch. I like it, but will it catch on?

Bill Gates: We expect that pretty soon, everybody's going to want one. It's going to be the price of doing business.

The Raven: What about Macintosh users, like me?

Bill Gates: It only works with a PC, but like I said, everybody will have to own a Fossil.

The Raven: One last thing, Bill. The GPS feature means it will know where I am when I download data on the road, right?

Bill Gates: Of course we'll have to know where you are. Then we can work with our partners to send information about products and services to you that are tailored to your location.

The Raven: And then I become a part of the Microsoft family.

Bill Gates: It's a beautiful vision.

There you have it, people. Fossil: the watch that takes a Fisking and keeps on ticking.

Hale Bopped

In a dramatic scene yesterday at Chicago's Federal Courthouse, World Church of the Creator founder and head scumbag white supremacist Matthew Hale was arrested on charges of plotting to kill judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow.

Lefkow, for her part, had been presiding over the World Church's fight to keep its name. Hale was showing up at the courthouse on a related matter involving contempt charges and neither he nor his supporters were aware the authorities had become privy to his plan to assault and murder Lefkow. When he showed up with his leather-clad bully-boys, the Feds scooped him right up.

Hale, who calls himself Pontifex Maximus—"highest priest"—holds his church out as a religious organization dedicated "to the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race."

Opting Out

Let's not forget a group even more vile and odious than the Church of the Creator: The Direct Marketing Association. Looks like they got the fix in and have derailed the National Call List plan that would have given you and me a chance to cut down on telemarketing calls.

Considering how much money they sling around in Washington, it was really too much to expect lawmakers to stand up for our interests here. The DMA apparently managed to subvert the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who announced today it was "unlikely" they would be able to fund the "do-not-call" list. Had they acted in time, we'd have had relief by August. Instead, any conceivable action has been delayed "for at least a year."

The Direct Marketing Association said it was pleased that the committee was proceeding slowly.

"The F.T.C. acted prematurely in attempting to establish this list," H. Robert Wientzen, president and chief executive of the marketing association, said today in a statement.

12:12:24 PM       

Did you notice that the American Dialect Society chose "weapons of mass destruction" as 2002's "Word of the Year"? The phrase faced some tough competition in the finals, beating out George Bush's "embetterment," and several other odd ducks that took flight during the year, like "regime change," "wombanization," "blog," and "Iraqnaphobia."

We pay attention to these things, and we've noted that while there were a few half-hearted attempts to breath life into "WMD" as an initialism (pronounced as letters, e.g., "FBI," "IOU"), English speakers as a group appear to have decided that "double-you-em-deez" isn't much of a timesaver, and that the abbreviation is unsuccessful in discriminating between "weapon" and "weapons," so the long form won out—in spoken English anyway, which brings us to our main subject: The Lord of the Rings, which has spawned the anorgasmic LOTR

Where, I'd like to know, did that nasty little "LOTR" abbreviation come from and why was it coined? It has its grammatically assiduous cousin, "LoTR," which sort of runs around on the floor in circles crying out, "Look at my lowercased preposition! I'm the correct one!" We laugh, we cry, we stomp on it until it stops squealing. Back to LOTR, this isn't the preferred usage of the film's producers, so I'll hedge a bet that it has its roots in the sequel to The Terminator, which was advertised widely as T2. This came out during the run-up of madness preceding "Y2K" and everyone was scrambling like crazy to come up with clever and witty little collocations of letters and numbers intended to ride sidecar on the larger phenomenon of the new millenium. Suddenly, "Part Two" and "The Sequel" became an endangered species and as proof allow me to submit the follow-up to Stuart Little, the anachronistic SL2.

A second level of pressure that factors in all this stems from Internet-speak: LOL, ROTFLMAO, BRB, AFK, etc. Any time you can insert one of these into an e-mail or Usenet posting, into IRC or ICQ chat, you mark yourself as an insider—always a plus!—and you transmit a subtle message that you're so awfully damned busy you couldn't be expected to actually type out all of those annoying little letters.

Make It Go Away

So what's wrong with LOTR and its bastard sequel TTT from a linguistic perspective? First off, you'll note that these things are a hybrid of initialisms and Internet abbreviations: They cannot be spoken at all, and in those few instances where people have taken a go at it, they rebuff the tongue in much the same manner as "WMD," so in oral discourse a fan is likely to just say, "The Lord of the Rings." Compressing the name down to its letters then isn't really doing anything of linguistic value, its a psychological gambit that broadcasts subliminal messages of which the user is probably oblivious; it just feels good to employ a bit of insider's jargon.

The government and the military have been coining in-house abbreviations for a long time, and if you ever sit down for lunch with a couple of GS-12s or higher, you're likely to be overwhelmed with incomprehensible phrases like, "I told the DOT PM we were still PMCSing the C12s." So perhaps in a like vein LOTR is a bonding opportunity; if two people use it in an exchange, they are lessening the social distance between themselves and chumming up, as it were. Maybe. But if you're one of the guilty ones, get up right now, go look in a mirror and say to yourself out loud, "Typing out 'The Lord of the Rings' is easy and I'm going to stop abbreviating it like a bucktoothed nimwit." You'll feel better and we'll thank you.

9:13:02 AM