I am seriously considering switching over to all-Windows products. Why?

Because this never-ending, annoying marketing campaign by Apple has convinced me that if I keep using Apple products I’ll turn into a gross metrosexual hipster who doesn’t know how to use a spreadsheet.

How do these hipsters afford their expensive Mac do-dads when they can’t even stomach doing anything but playing with photos and mp3 files? Since when did Apple become the frontman for denigrating productive, knowledgeable people as too uncool for their products?

For the record, I’d like to state that I hate anything which has ever been referred to as “The Arts”.

“Art” is something you buy. A museum is the showroom for the gift shop at the end of the tour. “Art” is not something with intrinsic value to be lauded and subsidized and revered beyond its productive and marketable profitability. It’s a product like any other. Those who say otherwise are either part of its lobby (and thus probably dependent upon the constant drip of tax dollars funneled to their particular fetish), or simply hate their own occupation or have some unrequited sense of worthlessness in their own life that they use art to fill.

I think that I was especially offended by this PSA Campaign just because I think of myself as one of the more liberal and sensitive types around when it comes to tolerating what others choose to admire or create in their lives. But I’m also a business analyst and number-cruncher by profession, and an urban planning and suburban gardening fetishist by avocation; and this campaign seems to say that what I’ve chosen to do with my life is a waste, and the only way to redeem myself is to solicit those fields which give me no enjoyment or pleasure (which seems oddly to be the only shared trait all things they call “the arts” have in common).

I just don’t see how such a group can be seen by anyone as anything but self-righteous elitists - yet they seem to be saying that they have the moral high ground, because they think “art” (meaning, essentially, performance and low-tech media art) is somehow objectively better than other vocations. Personally, when I see a clean, well-balanced Income Statement, an intricately detailed Execl spreadsheet, a well-thought-out database, a balanced and functional streetscape, or a productively diverse garden; I think of it as very artful - the person who manages that project must be talented in their craft.

Who are they to tell me that my delight in managing money and playing with maps is any less valuable than their enjoyment of watching people dance or sing or paint?

Yes, Ma Ha Ta - it’s the trendy new name for Manhattan. Oh, didn’t you know? Things just aren’t edgy or interesting when you call them by their name - you have to abbreviate the name into something meaningless and stupid-sounding.

No Da in Charlotte started it, of course. It stands for “Not Dangling”, I think - maybe coz only lesbians live there…