David Penberthy, the iPad, the Oz, and the mote in the eye ...

(Above: a screen cap of the Oz getting excited about the iPad. So if you click on the blue thingy link, you get no action)

It's hard being a journo. Week in, week out, the search for a fresh angle, sometimes in a field where the bystanders and gawkers and jay walkers have trodden into the mud every precious little spring flower of difference.

Much easier to select a loon and scribble loonish things about their loonish ways.

Even so, and all that said and done, enough already David Penberthy, and I'll bet you're dying to get one of those iPads they're dying to make. (Okay, I tweaked his header, but I reckon it fits).

Penbo whips himself up into a veritable lather about sundry ironies involving the iPad:

Call me a miserable old piece of shit but I reckon it’s pretty weird that on the same day that some of Australia’s most committed virgins are queuing up in the cold outside the Apple Store for the launch of the iPad, in China, they’re queuing up on the roof to kill themselves at the factory that manufactures them.

Well you miserable old piece of shit, take a look at the front page of The Australian, and get your broom and start cleaning out that augean stable, as Chairman Rupert and his lackeys celebrate the arrival of the iPad as a way of charging for content. Pretty weird huh?

Of course you could take this angle on all kinds of western consumption items - two dollar store items, sneakers, joggers, track suits, clothing, Nike, plasma screens, whatever of the thousand and one consumer items shipped out of Asia to a gluttonous west.

In the usual way, such a story wouldn't be a true moral tale without sanctimony and righteous indignation, especially if the queue is for a neat toy, as opposed to a rock concert:

If you want to know the story of globalisation, this one surely will do. On George St, Sydney, extra staff have been called in at the Apple Store to cope with the demand as hundreds of cashed-up geeks gather in a display of commodity fetishism which will hopefully be the subject of formal study by some sardonic anthropologist from the developing world.

Meanwhile, not that far north at the Foxconn factory in China’s Hunan province, nets have been installed on the roof after an 11th employee hurled himself to his death as the workers struggle to meet a deadline which has been created by our demand.

Apple is Apple so it has largely escaped the kind of Naomi Klein/No Logo vitriol which has damaged companies such as Nike and Puma.

And Murdoch land is Murdoch land and seems largely to have escaped Penbo's wrath, even if it seems that they're determined to be lickspittle lackey peddlers and mongers of Apple iPad friendly apps (along with the ABC and others determined to get on the gravy train).

Motivating Penbo is the kind of idle Puritanism that sees greenies retreat from consumerism to caves, or St. Simon Stylites clamber on to a pillar in the desert, or stick in the mud stay at homes mock trendies for being trendy. Except of course it's what we know in the trade as a neat double flip with reverse hypocrisy, since the point is also to berate greenies and hippies and zealots and Naomi Klein and No Logo for wanting an iPad and thereby showing double standards.

Of course if you follow this kind of stuff down the rabbit hole and chew on the mushroom long enough, there's no way anyone in the west can have any modern appliance, for fear of breaking the 'logo enhanced' lore or causing untold misery in China, way worse than Mao's efforts:

It’s because Apples are, like, soooo cool, and nobody else makes their stuff anyway, so it’s not like you have a choice or anything, you really just need an iPod and an iPhone and a Powerbook and now an iPad, right?

And I really need to buy and read The Australian, the Daily Terror and the HUN on my iPad, right? Not to mention The Punch when it finally works out what it's on about, and can charge for the pleasure of being read on an iPad, instead of just being the dullest conversation in Australia, right?

It's always funny when free market private enterprise lackeys get a touch of righteousness, and go socialist and start labelling other people who make and sell goods as somehow tainted. It's such an hysterical double-standard.

Oh wait, that's Penbo's line:

It’s such a hysterical double-standard and proof that when it comes to consumer boycotts people are only actually prepared to impose an arbitrary ban on something they think they can live without.

And that’s the flipside of the issue - why do people think they can’t live without this stuff?

Which begs an even more insidious question. Why on earth would anyone - except a journalist in search of an angle - imagine that people can't live without this stuff? Or forget that people from time immemorial have queued up for tickets to a Star Trek convention? Or mebbe Galaxy Quest?

And why wouldn't anyone understand that it's the basic business of marketing to whip up a 'must have it now' mentality. A technique which extends into every aspect of private enterprise marketing - must watch blue things hump beasts in 3D now, and help save News Corp, must see the toads humiliate the cockroaches in 3D now, and help save the Nine network, must spend money on Rupert Murdoch's daily news to save the newspaper industry now, read all about it latest digital edition ...

The point being? And don't tell me it's insanity everywhere ...

Oh wait that is the point, because it seems Penbo himself drank the kool aid:

I got an iPod last year. For those of you who don’t know it’s like a small computer version of a Walkman which contains music and if you plug it into things like the car radio, or the stereo, songs come out of it.

Gee, can we wiki that description? So much better and now and real than the inept wiki which calls it a portable media player.

But it’s just an appliance.

And at what point did our society start queuing for appliances? We’ve turned into the affluent version of the former Soviet Union.

Oh indeed. And at what point in our society did people begin to queue for dance marathons, and so provide the raw material for Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Perhaps it was at the same point that they learned to queue for a bus in Sydney.

I keed, I keed. The queue is after all a wonderful British invention that has been with us a long time, developed and refined until it reached a peak surreal existential absurdity in the queue for a taxi at Sydney airport.

Which leads me to this thunderous denunciation:

And at what point did our society start queuing for taxis? We’ve turned into the affluent version of Canberra airport.

But wait, let's not get in the road of Penbo's fine feathered flurry of thoughts, as the coffee drives the words onto the computer screen:

When the first toasters were released did people sleep out overnight in George St in their jaunty denim caps and waxed moustaches to be the first proud owner of a magic bread-warming machine? Did the ladies camp out in anticipation of being the first to own a curling wand? Was there a crush when the first Breville Kitchen Wizz hit the market?

Damn it, he left out the bit about getting into a queue to cross the Anzac bridge in peak hour. And camping out to see the Beatles. Too young.

Well it seems poor old Penbo needs to learn a little about queues and queue theory and luckily the wiki can offer up queue area and queueing theory as starters for those who care. You might then be able to make more sense of it than Penbo:

We’ve all got too much time on our hands, too much damned money and too screwed up a sense of what is actually important or even interesting.

Surely he can't mean reading The Punch? Only sadists and surrealists can see the point of that, given that it's not actually important or even interesting ...

Yet Penbo does raise a matter of great concern.

Sadly it seems the great British queue might be in decline - see the Good queue guide - and it raises the question why Penbo isn't celebrating the revival of the ancient art of queuing on the streets of Sydney?

Threatening the queue is a faster pace of life, higher expectations and a growing intolerance at being kept waiting and Mr Stewart-David's research has identified the points at which queues threaten to break down.

These include when people feel a queue is too long or when the wait exceeds their expectations - three to four minutes is our tolerance level for buying a train ticket - at which point "people visibly begin to look stressed or walk off".

Three to four minutes? Sheesh, and they reckon Londoners are tough. As the great Dundee himself might say, that's not a queue, come to Sydney and we'll show you a queue.

Meanwhile the hyper-ventilating righteous Penbo is in wrap up mode:

Personally I just love the fact that even the most hyper-groovy among our number can assuage their instinctive and loudly-voiced concern over dodgy, life-ending work practices in the developing world, just because it’s just such a totally cool must-have item.

Fuck me dead. I used to think that I'd perfected the art of grumpy fear and loathing of the hyper-groovy, but who could top the chip on the shoulder routine developed by Penbo?

Well I guess it's time to admit I don't have to queue for an iPad. I've already got one, and it's a nice toy, and now I'm super hyper-groovy, so you all can get sanctimonious about the dodgy life-ending work practices in the developing world, but truth to tell Penbo all you've got to show for your own support for dodgy life-ending work practices is an iPod.

Sucker!

Bet you use a PC too.

Sadly, the one bit of consumer advice Penbo could have given, he didn't. Which is to say that if you're not an early adopter, obsessed with the new, then it will pay to wait for the second iteration of the iPad. The next generation will have more features - there's already talk of a camera, storage will likely be enhanced, the kinks ironed out a little more, and so on - and the pricing might not be so savage, as Apple has a long history of fleecing early adopters while doing product development on the fly.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of forming a queue to protest at News Corp:

Personally I just love the fact that even the most hyper-groovy among our number can assuage their instinctive and loudly-voiced concern over dodgy, life-ending work practices in the developing world, by trying to make a metaphysical mountain out of a mole hill involving the news that a new gadget has hit the streets. While forgetting that their capitalist employer News Corp is wildly excited about it ...

Or is this just a deep game being played by Penbo to promote the iPad, in the way that Republicans proved government couldn't work by promoting George Bush to run it?

UPDATE: Mumbrella's How The Australian fell in love with the iPad. What a hoot.