Jeff Vrabel: I want, no, I NEED, an iPad

Well, as usual, my attempt to avoid coveting a sleek and impractical object produced by the nerd-leprechauns at Apple has lasted until the exact moment they showed a commercial for it on the TV. Thanks, Oscars, not only did you throw my spring budget into chaos with your deliciously tempting ad for an electronic device I couldn't possibly need but would give me something do with my other hand while I'm futzing with the iPod during the commute, and then you give Best Costume Design to "The Young Victoria?" Did I miss the part where you all became gravy-brained goat-people? Because the costume designs in "The Young Victoria" are a HUMILIATING JOKE WHEN COMPARED TO THE SHATTERING GRANDIOSITY OF THE COSTUME DESIGN OF "COCO BEFORE CHANEL." This is why real America hates the Hollywood elite; go back to British Columbia and take your Neil Patrick Harris with you, appeasers.

Anyway, I was talking about Apple (for the purposes of finishing this piece I'm turning the broadcast off before they announce Best Documentary Short because if it isn't "Music By Prudence" I am going to smash all the windows at the mall). We have all Apple products here at the house, for two very simple reasons: 1. We deeply enjoy feelings of smug superiority and 2. They work. Knock on wood, but in four years we haven't had one single notable thing go wrong with either of them, which, given the amount of illegal music and international pornography I download, is a miracle on par with that time I found the Virgin Mary's profile in my yogurt swirls. And I really mean this, I'm not just saying it so Apple sees me on their Google Alerts and decides, hey, we should send this guy some free gear or something just for being so nice and complimentary to us and besides Apple Apple Apple Apple.

Now, contrast this with the eventual fate of my previous PCs, one of which was invaded by a virus so nefarious that it required a nerd friend of very specific talents to pull some crazy coding magick; I don't think I ever saw his hands move, even when he opened a bag of Funions and a two-liter of Dr. Pepper with the same finger. Come to find out I had been infected by schpilkis in my home directory, which meant terrible things for the rootkit, caused an itchy rash in my defragmentation sector and, it goes without saying, permanently inflamed my mobile uplink frog exaggerator interocitor. Also the drive where you put in the floppy disks was producing its own oatmeal, which was something, incidentally, that the customer service people were completely helpless about.

That was then, this is now: About a month ago I attempted to accomplish the insanely convoluted task of moving pictures around a friend's PC using the new Windows Laserbrain or whatever; the process was akin to waking up on a plane that has just landed in Bangladesh and being told that you had 25 minutes to board a second flight to a very specific portion of Nepal, and also you were not allowed to use your mouth and were exceedingly drunk (way drunk, like women's hockey team drunk). The process proved literally so hair-pullingly frustrating that though not a religious person, I found myself praying fervently for some sort of horrific virus to infect the snot out of the offending computer, which, of course, took approximately eight seconds.

Anyway, my point to all this is: I like Macs. So now I am compelled to like the hilariously named iPad, which is basically an iPhone that has been flattened and which will be soon owned and proudly displayed by your contact list's most pretentious cretins. The iPad has no practical purpose — unlike, say, the iPod, which finally allowed me to have 1,500 Springsteen songs available at any time for me to drive away girls with — but in this context "practical purpose" is for jerk-losers, as the iPad is shiny and glistens in the sun and you can watch "Star Trek" on it and I WANTS IT.

Please note that I am speaking from experience here. The same shame spiral happened with my iPhone, which receives actual calls and is partially a light saber but which I am using mostly as a mobile device for playing “Scrabble” games with people who are DESTROYING ME, mostly because, and I don't want to sound like a sore loser or anything, iPhone “Scrabble” allows words which are ENTIRELY FICTIONAL, like "tare" (not a word), "liri" (fully not a word), "ods" (not a word even in scrambly Eastern European languages), "ana" (part of a word, but not a word), "tain" (would be a word if we were playing “Scrabble: Medieval Poets Edition,” which we are not) and "ki," which my auto-spell corrector WILL NOT EVEN LET ME TYPE RIGHT NOW. So basically what I have is a $200 device for getting irrationally angry at distant board-game nemeses, AND NOW I WANT THE SAME OBJECT IN LARGER DIMENSIONS. I don't think I've ever odsed my liri this much.

Jeff Vrabel is writer wondering if anyone else has trouble playing iPhone “Scrabble” while driving, because they really should have made that easier. He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com or followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.