I’ve been a fan since the very early days. (1980, with an Apple II+.) But today you’re really pissing me off. Here’s why.

I have a MacBook Pro. And an iPhone. And an iPad that I will never get back from my wife. And a company with servers and lots of clients. An and assistant. So all of my stuff has been set up to sync automatically so that when I make a change in my iPhone, or on my desktop, or when my assistant makes a change to my schedule from her computer, it’ll all be in alignment. That was all through a piece of software that you developed, and that you hated, called MobileMe. Yeah, it kinda sucked. Steve Jobs even made light of it in one of his famous presentations of new Apple products. It’s written up negatively in that recent bestselling biography of Steve Jobs. But y’know what? It worked for me.

Then two days ago I found that none of my stuff was syncing. I know you know why:  because you shut down Mobile Me. Everyone must move to iCloud. OK, fair enough; I get it. I was ready to make that switch. But to make that switch, to embrace the iCloud that now I must embrace, I learned this morning that I’d need to “upgrade” my OS to Mountain Lion. So while the tech guys were here this morning, and after they delivered that bad news, they set up my laptop and God knows what else to download and install the insipidly named Mountain Lion, while I was out most of the day drumming up business. I just got back and went to use my laptop and here’s what I found.

Everything has changed.

I am extremely scheduled. The Normandy invasion was less planned out than my calendar, from now through… infinity. I have meetings, speaking engagements, lectures, workshops, running kids to innumerable essential private lessons and classes, reminders to do this or that — and now my calendar looks utterly different. Maybe it’s just stylistic — that now the design of it looks like something from the Arizona territory circa 1878 — but hey, wasn’t Steve Jobs all about style? Wouldn’t he be pissed? I am.

My mail? Whatever surgery your new big cat OS is performing, it’s taken 30 minutes so far and shows no signs of abating. Here’s what I wanted to do:  Send. An. Email. I’m sure it’ll be whizbang terrific when you’re finally done “improving” it — but I don’t care. I just wanted to use it.

I also got a weird little video that popped up on my screen and showed me two fingers massaging icons up and down. I don’t know what it means. I hesitate to find out. I don’t think I need it either.

To be fair, I’m betting I’ll actually like some of these changes, once I understand them. But I didn’t want them. I didn’t ask for them. They were shoved down my throat because here’s what I actually wanted:  for my iPhone to sync with my laptop. Everything worked flawlessly until at some point you decided it had to change. And that’s why I’m pissed.

In 1984, you famously ran a commercial of a runner slinging a hammer through the screen visage of Big Brother (read, at the time, IBM). Now I think it’s you, and I’m wishing I had a hammer.

If the “incredible offer” made to me by The New Yorker to subscribe for “only” $64.99 a year doesn’t strike you as so incredible either, you can do what Michael Tsai recommends: Call them and pay only $39.99 a year.

So some members of the Secret Service has been caught with prostitutes while on a foreign visit with the President. I’ve given the Secret Service little thought, but now that I’m thinking about them, I have to wonder:  How secret are they really, since we know they exist? If they were really secret, we wouldn’t know they exist, right? (And since we do, isn’t it therefore the height of arrogance for them to be called the “Secret Service”? This reminds me, for similar reasons, of “the Moral Majority,” whose spokespeople are generally in the minority, and are frequently trundling off to prison with their pants down around their ankles.

Wouldn’t you think the Secret Service would keep their indiscretions, y’know, secret? So instead of the Secret Service I think we should hire ninjas. Whatever the peccadilloes of ninjas, we know nothing about them. All in all, they are far, far more secret.

This perfectly illustrates why Europeans think what they think of Americans. Exciting, no?

Thanks to Mark Chaet for letting me know about this.

I just got a “Rate Reduction Notice” from The New Yorker magazine. Evidently, as a “preferred subscriber,” I am entitled to “specially reduced rates” when I extend my subscription now. In this case, my special rate reduction would put me at $64.99 for the year — an incredible savings of $216.54 off the cover price!

My first question when I got this was: Why am I a preferred subscriber — are there subscribers who are unpreferred, and why am I better than they?

My other questions, of course, were: when is my subscription up, and what did I pay last time?

Here’s when my subscription lapses: August of next year. And here’s what I paid last time: $39.95.

Whether or not it pays to read The New Yorker, it certainly pays to read their promos carefully.

“The Avengers” movie premieres in a few weeks. Jack Kirby was the co-creator of Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury, and even Loki. Without Jack Kirby, there’d be no Marvel Universe, and none of the multi-billion-dollar global enterprise associated with the hundreds of characters he created for Marvel (or for DC, for that matter).

Here’s a remembrance of Jack from his son Neal, about what it was like to grow up as Jack Kirby’s son. I met Jack Kirby twice in my life, once as a 14-year-old and once as a grown man, and both times I was speechless. I’ve met Pulitzer prize winners, presidents and governors, billionaires, movie stars, rock stars, and people of all stations of life — but I was only ever in awe of Jack Kirby.

We need to get this guy together with David Lynch. YEAH TOAST!

“Crazy Clown Time,” courtesy of David Lynch. Yes, that David Lynch, collaborator with Angelo Badalamenti, Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, Karen O, and many other fine talents, and, oh yeah, film director as well, as shown here. Is this video, as a friend of mine posted today hopefully, a return to “Eraserhead” form? No (and it’s not even a return to “Dune,” a film that some of us, for inexplicable reasons, can’t quite get enough of, no matter how ill-conceived and often poorly executed it is). But what the video of “Crazy Clown Time” definitely is is a return to offbeat lo-rent white trash filmmaking, the sort that very few of us knew made up the actually “good” movies at the video stores. Enjoy.

P.s. And, oh yes, David Lynch’s solo album is most definitely available on iTunes.

And who better to help you do that, but the Daleks?

(Well, maybe the Cybermen. After they get involved, you really don’t have a care in the world.)

Yes, I did go see Waiting for Godot at the Taper on Friday night, and it was marvelous. It was surprising how fresh and entertaining the play was, and how moving in its conclusion, especially given how many times I’ve seen productions of it. Big congrats to the cast, director Michael Arabian, all the designers, and everyone else involved, on a flawless production.

But there’s another production that I’d like to talk about at greater length.

On Tuesday night I was able to see another play, this one the world premiere reading of a new play that marked the literary debut of a promising new playwright: my daughter Emma. Emma is an 8th grader who participated in a program at her school by Center Theatre Group — the folks who put on that Waiting for Godot production you should see — wherein students work for many weeks with a playwright who is a teaching artist to learn how plays work, and how to write one. Over the course of the school year, they do improv games, write scenes and lines of dialogue, and get to work with professional actors, culminating in an evening of readings by those professional actors. (One of whom, it turns out, was Rob Nagle, whom I’ve worked with at Moving Arts.) Eight of these brief plays, each of them co-authored by small groups of the students, were performed on Tuesday night by the actors.

Here’s the plot of the play by my 13-year-old daughter and her co-authors:

A father asks his (13-year-old?) daughter if she’s done her homework. She says she wants to watch TV first. (As I was watching this unfold, I was immediately hooked by the theatricality of this setup. I closely related to it, and its inherently theatrical complications.) He gets angry and loses his cool — so the daughter and her mother leave. They just get on a bus and leave town. For good. And then the father is angry with himself (for enforcing homework, I guess).

Clearly, there’s a lesson here for all of us, and that lesson was not lost on me: Be careful about how you insist on homework getting done, lest your wife and daughter get on a bus and leave town for good.

Over the years, I have made appearances in the writing of other people I’ve known, sometimes in poems, sometimes in plays or stories or essays, sometimes thinly disguised and sometimes not. One time I went to the reading of a play at the Pasadena Playhouse by someone I know and the characters were discussing another character, unseen in the play, who seemed rather much like me, and whose character name was “Mr. Wochner.” That seemed eerily similar to my own name, which is “Mr. Wochner.” So I have had previous experience of seeing a character that might or might not be based upon me shown in another light. But to be the abject villain of a piece — a piece written in part by my daughter, in which our heroine simply wants to watch TV unfettered by the necessities of homework — was new. And to witness the wretched state that the encounter with a demanding father left the mother and daughter in as they rode the bus to a faraway town was to leave me questioning my approach to homework. (Mother: “Do you think we’ll be okay?” Daughter: “I don’t know.”)

I was impressed with all eight of the students’ plays. They were funny, they were dark, they were brave, and they were untrammeled by the proclivities of professional playwriting that insists upon such things as subtext. In these plays, what is said is what is meant, and that made me hunger for such a world, where if we don’t want to go somewhere we say it, where if we want something from each other we just demand it immediately with the expectation that it will be given. The evening was a window into the mind of 13-year-olds, and that made for an experience I’ll long remember. And I offer this as proof: Tonight I took my family out to dinner, and then when we got home, we watched some TV. And when it was over, and only when it was over, did I tell my daughter to go do her homework. I don’t want to find her with a one-way bus ticket to elsewhere.