In this video, you can watch the daughter of a Dutch filmmaker age 12 years in 3 minutes. It’s fascinating to watch because it shows just how quickly our lives pass. Just yesterday, I emailed a photo of my wife and me with our first-born when he wasn’t yet one year old. My caption: “Look how young we were before these rotten kids aged us 20 years.”

This video also holds relevance for me because I have a daughter who is now 13 (and will soon be 14). Note in the video how, from age 10 on, the girl is gabbing incessantly in every frame. We’ve had a similar experience at our house. As for the aging aspect, I aged 12 years in 3 minutes just last night when she recounted something she’d watched on Netflix streaming with her friend. For just a moment, I considered blocking the service — then remembered watching secretly “Satyricon” late at night on an early pay service at my brother’s apartment at age 11. At least she told me. I told no one — until now.

I was sad to see that Jonathan Frid, the actor who cast a large shadow on my childhood by playing Barnabas Collins on “Dark Shadows,” died the other day. (And here’s the joke: Seeing the trailer for the campy new Tim Burton version killed him.) Like many other kids in the mid-to-late 1960s, I raced home from school to watch it; that’s what one had to do in those pre-VCR, pre-DVD, pre-DVR days: catch it in real time or miss it. My daily viewing was further complicated by the Glen Jupin factor. Glen Jupin was a classmate that my grandmother watched along with me in the afternoon for a little spare cash. He was also a fraidy cat, unable to handle the gothic horror of “Dark Shadows,” or its implications that various family members could be ghosts or secret monsters. Every day it was a battle with my grandmother over Glen Jupin, who wailed that the show was too scary. My retort was the obvious one: If he didn’t like it, couldn’t he go do something else? Why did I have to suffer because he couldn’t handle it? Some days I’d win, some days Glen Jupin in his pathetic striped lime-green shirt would win, and now as an adult I understand my grandmother’s decision-making process. I’m sure it seemed fair to take turns letting one of us win. To me, it just seemed arbitrary, and made me argue all the more.

In my playwriting workshop on Saturday, as we were discussing “Dark Shadows” and the late Mr. Frid, my friend and fellow playwright Tira volunteered that one could watch all the “Dark Shadows” one could ever want online via Netflix streaming. She said that she and a friend got roaring drunk and watched a bunch of them. So that night I fired up the xBox, logged onto Netflix, and started with the first episode featuring Barnabas (almost a year after the show’s debut). I watched three 22-minute episodes (22 minutes because of the lack of commercials), committing the terrible error of not having a friend over and getting roaring drunk first. At some point, I’ll watch some more, because my thinking is this: maybe they get better. In fact, I’m sure they get better; they would have to, because there is nothing conceptually possible below the nadir.

The first episode with Barnabas was episode 210, and the only part of Barnabas that was in that episode was his hand, at the very end. What precedes that is the most plodding of soap operas anyone has ever witnessed. Almost every bit of the preceding 22 minutes is a roundelay of inquiries about the whereabouts of a young ne’er-do-well named Willie Loomis whom everyone wishes gone. Here’s somewhat how the dialogue sounds:

Elizabeth Collins (to Jason McGuire, who is blackmailing her): You said that Willie Loomis would be gone!
Jason McGuire: Did I? Well, perhaps he is.
E: Well? Is he?
J: He may be. Have you seen him?
E: I haven’t. But Victoria may have. Vicki, have you seen Willie Loomis?
V: Willie Loomis! That awful man. Why, have you seen him?
E: I haven’t. Have you?
V: No, I haven’t. I thought he had gone.
E: Did he?
V: I don’t know. I didn’t see him.
E: So you don’t know if he’s gone.
J: See? He may well have done.
E: But we don’t know. (To the maid:) Have you seen Mr. Loomis?
Maid: Willie Loomis? I thought he’d gone.
E: Has he?
M: I don’t know. Should I make up his room?
E: Has he gone?
M: Not that I know of. I could make up his room.
E: Not until we’re sure he’s gone.
V: But we can’t be sure he’s gone.
J: He may well have done.

The last time I heard dialogue like this was in a production of “Waiting for Godot,” but that was purposely comic. Had Beckett and Ionesco not predated “Dark Shadows,” I’d think they owe a royalty. I can’t help thinking that Tim Burton got roaring drunk watching this and finding nothing but humor in it. Me: I fast-forwarded. A lot. In watching three 22-minute episodes, I’m estimating that I watched about nine minutes, because that seemed like the amount of actual content. Everything else was stuffing.

The pace is glacial and the staging awkward. (In the first few minutes, I watched a camera pull in for a closeup — and cast a huge shadow across an actor’s chest. Nice.) But one thing was palpable: Why Barnabas Collins, and the show featuring him, became, for a short time, such a sensation. Right at the outset, Jonathan Frid and the writers establish the anguish, the loneliness, and the inner torment of someone cast out of his own time and condemned to play a role he doesn’t want: that of someone who feasts on others. It’s a nice performance of a conflicted character, someone struggling to be evil, which would be easier, while trying to hold onto his goodness, which is harder. That made an impression in 1966, and it still does today.

Prediction: This year, Dick Clark will do an even worse job with that countdown.

The underused Maytag Repairman of yore has nothing on the nation’s loneliest salesman — the guy trying to do sales at the world’s only Blackberry store. It’s no threat whatsoever to the Windows Store, let alone the Apple Store.

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.