by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology Writer
There are cell phone apps for just about everything. The Appendectomy App allows one to perform this delicate medical procedure on oneself (being just one of thousands of self-surgery apps). The app Raiders of the Lost Arb gives anybody who wants it the chance to influence the prices of currencies in order to profit on the differences. Hit and Run is an app that robs banks. Copper Clappers is an app that arrests people who used the Hit and Run app to rob banks. Lawyer Up, Side of Files is an app that gives legal advice to people who used the Hit and Run app to rob banks and were caught by the Lawyer Up, Side of Files app. Bye Bye Baby is a babysitting app that sings lullabies to infants to help them sleep (it has been found to be effective on drunken adults as well, but the manufacturer, Gilbert Gottfried Studios, does not recommend it for that use). And, of course, Obfuscation Nation is an app that allows lawmakers to oppose a bill even though they have no rational arguments against it by dressing up their speeches in extraneous deleterious verbiage.
These apps are wirelessly connected. The Appendectomy App, for example, works better when networked with smart operating room technology. Much better. In fact, don't try using this at home. Obfuscation Nation works best with a sweet suite of political apps that includes Debased, Depraved and Delay (which slows the passage of legislation and the nomination of everything from dogcatcher to Supreme Court judges with procedural roadblocks), Find a Catch and Release (an automatic press release generator) and The Buffer (which determines the best makeup for an appearance on Fox News, and then applies it to whatever face is in front of the phone). This allows the apps to work in unison with little human intervention
So little human intervention, in fact that, on Tuesday, everybody in North America took a holiday, letting their cell phone apps run things for a while.
"It was very liberating," said Monty Skezundo, who, at the time, had been serving 10 to 15 years for facial armed rubbery (he got caught when he mugged for the cameras).
Okay, bad example.
"Lazy idling liberating?" Conrad Black indignantly tweeted. "Montaigne would have had a conniption fit if he had been forced to listen to such meretricious claptrap! I absolutel"
Clearly, Twitter is not Black's ideal medium.
Admittedly, not everybody took a holiday. Think tank Libertarians who preached the "dignity of work" (because none of them had ever had to shovel shit on farms or in corporate boardrooms) stayed in the job as a kind of reverse Atlas Shruggedism. Many women CEOs preferred to stay at work because they could see the glaziers coming to fix the glass ceiling they had broken through with more shatter-proof materials. Stan Lee kept writing comics because he didn't know what else to do with himself.
Unfortunately, Everybody Except a Statistically Insignificant Number of People Whom We Can Pretty Much Ignore Took a Holiday wouldn't make for a very compelling headline. And, it's too long for a single tier. Even in a relatively small font for a headline. Even in a broadsheet. And, in any case, the cleverness of the Klaatu reference would be fatally undermined.
So.
Sales of picnic baskets soared, as did hotel room rentals and scrapbooking materials. "It was very liberating," chirruped National Restaurant Association President and CEO Dawn Sweeney via her Reporter Decoder App. "By which I mean, of course, that it liberated so much cash from our customers' pockets!"
But, the news wasn't all good for the economy. Sales of Valium were way down, as were sales of guns.
"Some people may think that this is a good thing," Nutcase Rifle Association President Ron Schmeits' Angry Flip the Bird App responded to my question (while he and his mistress were vacationing in Disneyland), "but as guns go, so goes the economy. Have you never heard of the Smith and Wesson Index? If we aren't breaking sales records for assault rifles, well - sniff - that's just not an America I want to live in!"
"What, after all, is life for?" Conrad Black mused online. "Trying to snatch a few moments of pleasure out of a drab and painful existence? Or, working to one's... cont'd fullest capacity in order to develop the resources to snatch a few moments of pleasure out of a...a drab and otherwise...umm, otherwise... cont'd painful existen - look. I'm not against pleasure. I just don't believe that most people have earned it yet!"
Clearly, Black is mastering the art of the tweet.
The Don't Bury the Lede! App contributed to this article. By which we mean it wrote the entire thing while Nancy Gonglikwanyeoheeeeeeeh caught a flick. Tracy Flick, actually. In the movie Election.