Nokia BLADE a Painful Tech Hit

arents’ groups and otologists alike are up in arms over Nokia’s latest entry into the increasingly cutthroat cell phone market, the Nokia BLADE, an innovative new cell-phone/pocket knife combination that offers users with limited pocket space the best of both gadgets in one sleek package.

“We think the BLADE will be a hit with consumers who are tired of carrying a cell phone and a big, bulky knife everywhere they go,� explained Nokia spokesperson Dalton Hughes. “Or also with people who are sick of having to switch hands to go between talking and cutting tasks.�

“This phone is da bomb!� gushed teen Roger Salmong, bleeding profusely from the ear. “When I’m not hollering with my homies, I can cut shit!�

In spite of a generally positive reaction among consumers, the new phone has raised the ire of parents’ groups who had a hard enough time getting their kids off the phone for family time even before it became a handy cutting implement.

“I thought it was hard to keep Stacey from bringing her cell phone to the dinner table before,� lamented housewife Greta Thomas. “But now she says she needs it to cut her pork chops. What do you say to that?�

Otologists, or “ear doctors� to the unwashed masses, also take issue with the new phone, citing a sharp spike in the rate of ear contusions being reported in hospital emergency rooms since the phone’s release last month.

“It really is a serious problem,� explained a bashful Dr. Dennis Loham, sporting a large white bandage covering his left ear. “You think you’d have to be stupid to forget to retract the phone’s folding blade before trying to take an incoming call, but it really is easy to space out on it. In my office alone, we’ve seen—hold on, I have to take this. Hel—oh sweet fucking Jesus, not again!�

The rise of multipurpose phones in recent years has concerned parents nationwide to varying degrees, having a large impact on concerned parents, yet hardly any at all on alcoholics or other individuals who give less than a shit about their children. For concerned parents, however, the thought of their children carrying a telephone, web browser, video game console, digital camera, personal data organizer and MP3 player around in their pockets has unsettling ramifications. Some even remained concerned after the commune explained that all of these functionalities were packed into a single small cell phone, not a large assortment of bulky devices likely to damage a child’s expensive church slacks. Others needed an explanation of what an MP3 was, or wanted to know if their phone at home could take pictures.

The small handful of parents who understand both the technology and its ramifications share concerns about giving children and teens unsupervised access to the Internet, violent video games, or scary futuristic Herbie Hancock music via their cell phones. Now that a sharp, ridged blade has been added to their list of concerns, many parents are considering drastic measures. The most appealing of these involves sending their children to military school, where they’ll at least learn to handle a knife/phone, and will stop carving “FART� into the banister out in the hallway.

The Nokia BLADE retails for $149 and is available in blood-masking red, surgical silver and camouflage.

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It never fails, I tell you. The last good kidnapping was the Patty Hearst case. Kidnappers so damn good at it they convinced her to join up with them. That Symbionese Liberation Army made it cool to kidnap. Ever since then it's been all downhill. Half-assed kidnapping attempts, pervs just kidnapping to commit sexual crimes and murder the victims, or the worst, the parents or relatives who kill then fake a kidnapping. What a bunch of poseurs.

I mention all this because I was the victim of a kidnapping last week, if you can call it a kidnapping. I hesitate to use the word out of respect to more famous accused kidnappers like Bruno Hauptmann or such. Then again, there's a lot of questions about whether he did it or Lindbergh killed his own son, so maybe he's one of those poseurs I mentioned earlier.

The wannabe-kidnappers grabbed me as I left the commune offices for the day Friday, just before lunch. I was forced into a minivan at knifepoint by a burly man in a Member's Only jacket, which told me right away the guys I was dealing with hadn't seen much success through kidnapping before. Not that I was expecting Gucci suits or anything, you want to maintain a low profile. But I do mean low, not pathetic. If people are throwing you change on the street you're not exactly sinking into the background.

Turns out the knife wasn't even a knife, it was a clothespin sharpened at the end. If I had wanted to test it, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have even broken the skin. I probably could have escaped, but I'm always intrigued by kidnappings and I wanted to see how this one turned out.

I'll cut right to the chase: Boresville. The six times I've been kidnapped and held for ransom have all been letdowns, but this was the king of the losers. The perpetrators, two dudes, took me back to their one bedroom apartment and tied my leg to the dining room table. Then they stuck my fingers in a Chinese finger trap, presumably because they ran out of rope. If I'm not mentioning the kidnappers by name, it's through no effort to conceal their identities because I've fallen in love with them like that Helsinki Formula or whatever it's called. It's because they didn't make a lasting impression of any sort, I couldn't even give a description to the cops.

Then, after going through all the trouble of kidnapping me, the cockknockers had no idea who to tell that they were holding me for ransom. How embarrassing. They called up Red Bagel at home but he was obviously in a fit of ether madness or something, he kept dropping the phone and wasn't even coherent. At least it might have been Red Bagel, sometimes Lil Duncan answers his phone, though I'm not saying anything everybody else doesn't know. And then the stupid kidnappers wouldn't pay the long distance charges to call my parents, which doesn't make much difference anyway because my parents don't have any money anymore. Why do you think they've been trying to have another kid for 15 years now? They need someone to share their love with? Ha.

Come Monday morning these two shmoes had to be back to work at Hardee's or they were going to be fired, they had missed too many days already. Call me crazy, but if you're going to plan a kidnapping right, at least have the foresight to ask for a few days off. This is not the kind of thing you do over a weekend. Anyway, I hate to have an anti-climactic ending, but I bit through the fingertrap and then bit through the rope and escaped. And the only reason I bit through the rope was to add a little bit of excitement to the story somewhere.

I'm a little nostalgic for the kidnappings of my youth, where the guys weren't perfect, but at least they had some things right. Some even blindfolded me so I couldn't see their faces. Asked for millions of dollars my parents never had, even if they didn't really want that much, you know, just to make me feel special. But I guess those days are gone. Now you can be kidnapped by any idiots with a pointy object, a minivan, and a couple days off.

If anybody is serious about trying, though, I'll be checking out of work around noon this Friday. Unless I decide to cut out early.

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Sir, let the truth ring out from mountaintop to mountaintop, and the desperate vagrant valleys between those mountaintops, too: Some secrets are better left secrets.

A few weeks ago my brother, Gay, made some snide comments about me, and as you might guess, I railed against them and called him a liar. And he is a liar, he's the first to not admit it, but he insisted these particular claims of his were accurate. Since he's a liar, that would have been enough to convince me they weren't true. But he produced pictures, which complicated the matter.

With my resident Chief Debunker Gordon Chumway on hand, I proved the photos were not faked. But were we faked? Replaced with gullible fools who could no longer tell the difference between fakes or legitimate pictures? It seemed possible, and Gordon and I argued with each other, going in circles until we accidentally went back in time, changed history, and erased the existence of our favorite commune correspondent Penny Priddy. This was getting us nowhere. I sought ought professional help.

My usual hypno-regression therapist, Dakota, put me to the ultimate test, and scoured my brain to find deeply repressed memories. And what she found was the worst of all possible conclusions: For a short time, I was a member of the College Republicans.

Oh, hideous fate, readers! It's far worse than the uncovered repressed memories of my multiple molestations by celebrities and alien abductions. In fact, those occasionally gave my life some meaning. But this…! Sir, I have been duped or railroaded or convinced with sheer logic to join nearly every political organization over the years. I have had flirtations with the Democratic party on numerous occasions, and a nasty dry hump with the Green Party throughout the 1990s; I have supported Libertarians, Anarchists, Communists, Eco- and Social-focused parties over the years. I am a proud Sandwich-Socialist, leading back to the grand old days when I invented the party. But a Republican? I shudder to think.

Not that I deny the horrible truth. Dakota has never led me astray on repressed memories before. Besides, if I dwell on it too long, I'm worried I will eradicate other commune staffers, and we're overworked as it is. No, I believe it's true, especially considering the context it was all placed in. The mid 1950s, attending an ivy league school I'm court-ordered not to name-drop anymore, just off on my own from my father and my unhappy childhood. I had sworn off the smoked buffalo meat business and had my permanent falling out with dear old dad. I needed belonging, conformity. I needed ascots and blazers with emblems and golf courses and yachting clubs. The small stipend father sent to me was enough to make me a rich young man, and I found solace in the inbred classes. And, much to my regret, I did like Ike.

To make it clear, this is not who I am. It's who I was at one time. I fell out of the good graces of the well-to-do by the time the 1960s started, and I found my true calling in developing ghost divining equipment. I rejected father's money and made my own living working in various odd jobs and odd journalistic magazines, like The American Journal of Sand and Bi-Curious. Somewhere, in the midst of making my old life, I must have repressed the old one.

And frankly, I was happy with things the way they are. If anyone provides a re-repression therapy service, please contact these offices immediately.

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