The Gizmodo dudes took TV-B-Gones to this year's Consumer Electronics Show.
There's only one thing you can do with a TV-B-Gone, and CES is full to the brim with big-screen TVs over whose remote receivers nobody thought to put a piece of tape.
Frankly, I found the older Apple Remote Front Row prank more amusing, but the sight of a video wall full of advertising going dark still warms my heart.
But man, check out some of the (500-plus!) comments on the Gizmodo page. Plenty of people just think it's funny, but there are many others accusing the pranksters of destroying the livelihood of the poor working stiffs at the show, endangering Gizmodo's own precious press "access", and thereby mis-serving their readers by reducing the chance that Gizmodo will be able to keep on covering the latest and most exciting developments in the world of high technology.
Bull, if I may coin a phrase, shit.
First up: Gizmodo are working stiffs too. They paid to go to the stupid show in the God-forsaken sweaty spangle-hole that is Las Vegas, and once they got there they couldn't quite figure out why they'd bothered.
I'm only peripherally associated with the gadget-blog world, and can only imagine how spiritually corrosive it is to be right at the coalface of Western society's ceaseless pursuit of boundless superconsumption of stupid crap, every day of the damn week.
I give a standing ovation to anybody who can cope with this strain by merely turning off a bunch of flatscreens, rather than taking systematically directed advantage of Nevada's easygoing firearms laws.
Former Gizmodo head Joel Johnson wrote, memorably, about the issue of gadget-mania a while ago. It is, as he says, insane to ceaselessly pursue every latest new gizmo, when long experience has taught you that new gizmos are always just as buggy and disappointing and unlikely to turn your life around as every previous device.
Devices that actually can change your life for the better do exist, but they're less than one per cent of the market, for reasons cogently explained in the above-linked Ten Reasons We're Doomed piece. And, hell, wait five years and you'll probably be able to pick up a bugless version for ten bucks. If you haven't been given six months to live, mellow out and see if you can't have just as much fun with a toy from yesteryear.
Secondly: I'm not sure exactly what Gizmodo (a site with Google PageRank eight, versus only six for dansdata.com) would have to do to get public relations people to shun them.
I don't think urinating on each and every PR person they met would quite do it.
Stabbing them might.
Turning off their video walls? That doesn't make the cut.
Oh, and when I used to do trade-show stuff years ago, we'd get at least one dude a day who thought it was fun to just yank cables out of the back of our gear. If the cable had a screw-in plug, you'd better leave it unscrewed, or a whole computer could be taking a ride off the top of your chintzy glass display case.
We freakin' dreamed of an attack that could be defeated with a few squares of electrical tape.
UPDATE: Gawker staffer banned from CES OMG.
(Said "staffer" is Richard Blakely, who did indeed do the dastardly remote-control deed but is not actually even one of the standard Gizmodo writers, so won't necessarily have any need to go back to CES anyway, even if they don't completely forget about the ban.)
And here's Joel Johnson again, on the subject "Do Gadget Blogs Hurt the Environment?"
UPDATE 2: Brian Lam, Gizmodo Editor, cordially invites the haters to lighten the hell up.
