My mother, who is insane, prints every email she gets. I have many times tried to explain this is not necessary, that it rather defeats the purpose of email, that the "e" in "email" stands for "electronic," that it cuts against the jib of the paperless office philosophy, that the nice folks at Juno employ unpaid interns who nightly make backup copies of every missive she receives in some windowless server farm in the Calcutta suburbs. All for naught. She has a reason for printing her emails that is beyond the reach of reason.
The reason my mom prints her emails is because she is insane. But the avowed reason, the advertised reason, the functional reason, is her long running feud with my Aunt Belladonna. Belladonna LabKitty comes from the Lino Lakes side of the family. Generally good folk, the Lake people -- hard working, clean shaven, and some of the best Evinrude mechanics you'll find anywhere -- but they can be a little loose with the truth, especially when there is an election, free sample, or family point of pride on the line.
And so my mother's one true joy in life, other than her VHS collection of MacGyver and the time I beat Donny in the Circle Pines annual Halloween contest (she made me a toothpaste tube costume. Crest, I think) is catching Belladonna in a fib. Aunt Bel will be over at the house for lutefisk and coffee and she'll say something like "I never said Linda shouldn't have gone to beauty college" and mom will let fly a piratey O ho ho! and scamper down the hall to her sewing room and rifle through an elaborate collection of collated and cross-indexed printed emails until she finds the one in which Aunt Bel did indeed state Linda shouldn't have gone to beauty college (at least until the twins were in day care) and mom will rush back to the kitchen holding the smoking gun excitedly tapping her finger at the very sentence (which she may have even taken a moment to underline and date). Aunt Bel will then light a cigarette and stare out the window and mutter you get this from dad.
I didn't tell you this to pick on my mom (love you, Cat Mother!); I tell you this as inspiration for USez.
For all of my mother's neuroses, which are multifarious, you gotta admit there is an admirable kernel of an idea in her demented worldview. Modern society has become a flood of unchallenged unchecked nonsense, a steady stream of psychobabble, technobabble, and just plain babble issuing out of every orifice, thundering down from the mountain tops and bubbling up from the water table. What better way of re-tethering ourselves to reality than being constantly called out on wrongness? How can we hope to better ourselves if our every flaw is not seized upon and shown to us? Some say that is the job of a spouse, but for those of you who cannot afford a dowry there is USez.
In USez, there are events and there are players. Players make predictions about events; events are things players make predictions about. When the time of the event has passed, the entry is revisited and the correctness or wrongness of the player or players who proffered a prediction is noted. Celebration (alternatively: lamentation) commences, and the trustworthiness of the player is automatically updated, a score indicating the percentage correct of a given player's predictions, which is displayed along with other pertinent info on the player's avatar. Each player can make predictions about any event, and each event can have multiple player predictions pending.
LabKitty is not entirely unawares of human nature, and it occurred to me that calling out someone for wrongness might best be served with a dose of good humor, so as to encourage back slapping rather than face punching once the music stops. Here's a few of them:
Each avatar has a name, by the way, which can be found somewhere out there on the Internet. I will not tell you the names here because they might be the source of a future Do Something, Win Stuff contest.
Your avatar, screen name, and trustworthiness quotient can be shared with your friends, coworkers, and other associates, assuming they have also purchased a copy of USez. All this sharing biz will require some faculty with the networking features of iOS which I know nothing about because it doesn't work in the iPhone simulator and I have an Ericsson T-10 World which has about as much chance of running an app as it does connecting with the cell tower on the building across the street I'm literally looking at out the window as I get zero bars. (I bought the T-10 because it was the only phone offering service in both North America and Europe, which seemed important at the time for reasons I can no longer remember.) Anyway, these are problems waiting for you should you choose to develop USez and I leave it to you to solve them. I'm more of a big picture kind of cat.
What is best in life? the chieftain asked. To crush your enemies, Conan answered. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of the women. To which my mother would add: ...and catch your sister in a fib and shove it in her stupid face.
Sisters, amirite?
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