I would be really mad if somebody smashed my phone. These fuckers and their cultural myopia/pedestalism can fuck off back to cool britainnia.

I think if I ever stooped to the level of owning a mobile phone and it got snatched and smashed by two men waddling along in 8 foot mobile phone costumes then I'd end up being pretty sanguine about it. Ultimately.

C'mon guy, the one where they snatch it out of the back pocket of the prick with his ass hanging out of his BMW gave me the schadenfreude equivalent of an orgasm.

(I bet I'm missing an ümlaut or some shit in "schadenfreude" but, again, my dictionary dates back to when casually dropping german into conversation was kind of in bad taste.)

The target should be asses in BMW's then - mobile phones are morally neutral devices. C'mon guy indeed! It's funny ya, but the fucking moralizing, jesus.

If i ever stopped to the level or reading or posting on a blog...

D'yer mean my moralizing or the 8-foot mobile phone moralizing? How seriously could anyone take the moral leanings of an 8-foot mobile phone? What's up with the low-blow about blog-posting or reading?

I think that the mobile phones (and the smashing thereof) are just a conduit for critiquing and attacking the incontestably horrendous behaviour of their owners. Mobile phones are emphatically NOT morally neutral devices. That's absurd. They are invasive and loud and promote language-mangling and sneaky surveillance and a spike in the prevalence of STD's (Fact!) and finally they disrupt discourse. They extinguish everything that's special about interpersonal communication.

jesus what?

I will grant you that they are integral to exciting and dynamic psychogeography projects and I like that snake game that they have on there.

Enh? Oh no Spancan! I'm getting terrible reception!!!

No wonder people elsewhere think we all live in igloos, with blogs on .ca domains supporting such neo-Luddite inanity.

The cellphone is a useful tool, and smashing them or reacting with glee when they are smashed is, sorry guys, really adolescent. I expect better from the fine bloggers at sankey.ca.

Cellphone use, when done correctly, is about as invasive as excusing yourself from a table. In fact, in more advanced civilzations, cellphones are used mostly for texting, which is about as invasive as looking at your watch.

Sure, some cellphone owners are assholes. Some dog owners are assholes too. Shall I smash their dog when it shits on my lawn? Let's not forget SUV owners. Maybe I should try smashing their SUV when it idles outside of my apartment for what seems like forever. I have a feeling all this smashing would just end up with a glowering SUV owner clutching an injured Fifi while I'm served my sentence.

I'll take my cellphone over a set of tin cans and string any day.

Firmly in the polite cellphone user camp,

MK

Listen, no need to get all hand-to-brow about it; I'm all in favour of people in 8-foot dog costumes hurling dogshit at dog-owners who had their dogs shit on lawns and, oh, I don't know, people in 300-foot SUV costumes firehosing soot at people in idling SUVs.

Have you ever been to Finland? Try finding a public phone in Finland. Try asking where you can find a public phone in Finland without garnering the response, "Don't you have a mobile?"

Fuck Finns and their mobile phones.

It's funny when stuff like these clips circulates because immediately people get a persecution complex. I don't hate you for your mobile phone. A lot of people who are rude use mobile phones and I don't like the way that these people use their phones. Nothing short of a responsible-use Mobile Phone License would make me feel any better about this.

I like the British rule where you can only use your mobile phone where you feel comfortable farting. Farts are a good test of personal space.

Do you want a bluddy medal for your polite mobile phone camp membership?

When I start getting ticked off at an obnoxious cellphone user, I compare mentally whether it's worse or better than if that person was talking obnoxiously with an obnoxious friend. If they're driving, it's worse, but in most other cases it's actually better - half the obnoxiousness!

I don't buy the "half the obnoxiousness" argument. There's something about mobile phone conversations that makes them more intrusive than regular, normal conversations with a real live present human. Maybe it's that stupid people shout into their phone, as if it's a deaf or foreign person. Maybe it's the way people pace when they're on the phone, which they wouldn't do in a face-to-face talk, which makes it difficult for a non-participant to position themselves in such a way that they can't hear. Maybe it's that the human ear is accustomed to hearing both sides of a conversation, so only one half of one sticks out like public displays of insanity. Whatever. I'm totally in favour of wrecking the belongings of assholes, for purely selfish reasons: I am unrepentant in my love for my cellphone, and when I see an obnoxious asshole using their phone in an obnoxious asshole way, it makes me ashamed to own one. How dare these fuckers make me feel shame? They deserve to be kicked in the groin, repeatedly.

My point is that cellphone use itself isn't as bad as we think, mostly it's just different from what we're used to. It's obscene to fart in an elevator, but is it really that bad to phone-talk in one? No, since people talk on them and no-one complains. Talking loudly and pacing abnormally are frowned upon in general, mobile or no. I don't see why phone use should be hidden away and shamed like the smell of feces just because some of us grew up in a world where phones were tied to the ground. But it would be cool if phones made fart smells instead of ringing.

Here's a new one, just witnessed yesterday: woman buying groceries while on her cellphone. All well and good, except she fucking boggles the hell out of the pocketing-change-and-clearing-the-hell-out stage. She's paused there yammering and I'm all like "my turn bitch" in line behind her.

Did she answer the phone while actually purchasing items? Isn't that a good time to let the call waiting kick in? What was she thinking? Is she that desperately lonely? Did she think she could handle 2 degrees of multitasking and then clearly was not up to even one task? (Idea for film scene: person answers cellphone while in the middle of being beat up.)

Also seen: man walking quickly, blindly while texting. Get off my sidewalk shitbird.

I can see your logic there: we cell users must enforce the rules or we all look bad. I get the same thing with shitty bike riders. Drives me crazy to see some dirtbag biking along the sidewalk ringing his shitty little bell for all the pedestrians to clear away, what fucking topsy turvy world do you live in, scum, where you get to make all the transit rules?

Those angry swears were just in case the errant texter or the Kra-Z sidewalk biker are reading this. Which I can only assume they are.

>>>

I don't get this statement. I didn't futz around on this blog for 3 days so now there is fodder for making fun of? Dude, this is the thing, PEOPLE WHO DON'T BLOG OR PARTICIPATE IN BLOG CULTURE MAKE HUGE AMOUNTS OF SMASH SMASH FUN OF PEOPLE WHO BLOG...."those wankers who post shit on blogs...who reads it? i don't know their friends i guess - why don't they just go down to the pub and talk with their friends", they say, they scorn, they mock...

getting all excited and happy cell phones are being smashed in a blog post is like being anti-things-that-float while on a boat.

who gives a shit about psychogeography experiments. the other day i finished a meeting on bloor. i was gonna go home cuz i had no plans. it was 9pm. as i was walking home i called my friend C who has a mobile too - he was walking nearby on his way home!!! we then, while mobile, altered out paths and met! in the annex! and sat on a patio under a nearly full moon and had some beers and talked about stuff we'd never talked about before! this wouldn't have happened without my mobile communication device.

i laugh at phone smash because it is funny to see assholes get their shit smashed. the phone isn't the key variable here. the phone is a widgit in this laugh logic. irritating people irritate in many ways, not just phones. targeting phones is a cheap and easy way for smash smash people to avoid targeting the real culprit: assholes. ASSHOLES ARE BAD! ASSHOLES MAKE PHONES BAD.

but who cares who makes what bad. if you want to be anti cell phone do it...but there's a whole lot of other stuff you gotta start being anti about too then. destroy this blog!

who gives a shit about finland and no pay phones. it's not my culture, i don't know what the fuck they do over there - but i know they're the most "mobile" oriented culture on earth. it's nokia land.

have you ever been to england? i was in england last month and wanted a fucking filter coffee. i'd say, can i have a filter coffee and they say "don't you like Americano's?" fuck! smash smash england! smash all barrista's into the ground and stomp and laugh!

Spancan, your syntax makes several of your points totally impenetrable. That's a total diss when it comes from me. Also, it seems like you didn't really read the rest of the thread and were just out to get all shouty about stuff. That's also a total diss because it's coming from me.

An aside: I went away this weekend and the best part of the weekend was an acute lack of people pacing around and talking really loud on mobile phones. No psychogeography projects either.

Oh yeah, and since when is it okay to start a conversation with someone by shouting, "Where are you!?!?!!!" Judith Martin would stab you with a furthest-to-the-left fork for that shit and she'd be totally right to do it.

Fine fine....fast typing, laptops...bad syntax.

I agree with everything you said. No more cell phones. agreed. no more music made by computers either. can you imagine! what have we become.

PS> Blogging is all about bad syntax and fucking it up. Judith Martin was anti semetic AND got kicked out of Wellesley for smoking.

I quoted your post in the beginning of my rant post, but this blog thing didn't quote it and just left those >>>.

Would TheDiscourse and Spancan please make up? I like both of you in real life. My boredatwork mood is being gloomified by your duel, and I don't want to end up in a non-virtual place where you're both at -- like adHominem's birthday party -- until you've stopped yelling at each other.

It's all in good fun as far as I'm concerned. I do, however, object to the notion that because I embrace some technology, I have to embrace all technology. So what, like because I use a computer then I'm a hypocrite if I object to mobile-controlled baby-burning machines? I don't quite get it. Also, where are you getting the Judith Martin anti-semitism? I couldn't find any dirt at all using my pedestrian googling skills.

Also, finally, keep in mind that I live and work in mobile-phone-asshole ground zeros 1 and 2. I don't like this large-scale fear of solitude; if people can't keep themselves company for five bluddy minutes without shouting into a piece of plastic then I've officially lost hope in myself and everyone else.

I worked where TheDiscourse works and it's true, cellphones there are *different* than cellphones everywhere else. Everything is different there. Holy shit. That place made me hate: film directors, film, parents, cell phones, old people, smart people, people who had just eaten, food, and people. So I get where his cynicism comes from and maybe we should all be glad he's not anti- more things. Also, TheDiscourse, don't bother googling the things Spancan references. Only about 40% of them are real, and the rest are funny. However, even though Spancan's analogy (cell-hating-on-a-blog equals floating-thing-hating-on-a-boat) was kind of hyperbolic, he has a point that by blogging you're using a medium that's similarly vulnerable to rants/criticism as cell phoning, and for a few similar reasons, so just watch out. He's saying.