My
name is Wade Walker, and
I used to be an easygoing, devil-may-care kind of guy. Always quick with a
bon mot or horrifying vulgarism, I was great fun to be around, as long
as you could get me to keep my pie hole shut about those perennial favorite
topics, particle physics and China Chow's perfectly-formed labia minora. Above
all, I never took things too personally, figuring that most people were fundamentally
reasonable, or failing that, ignorable. But then I realized how much more
fun it would be if I took everything personally, and spewed out the
resulting feelings of peevishness and disillusionment in the form of vitriolic
screeds that I could post on the Web. And thus these essays were born.
The primary purpose of these essays is entertainment, though there is a lot of truth in them as well. So if you happen to agree with some point of view that I subject to a savage reductio ad absurdum, bear in mind that I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing towards you. I'm purposefully choosing the most denigrating possible ways of making my point, just to score cheap laughs at other people's expense. If you want closely-reasoned, genteel arguments from tweedy, pipe-smoking English gentlemen of approximately the same philosophical bent, read The Economist. But if you're the kind of person who likes a viewpoint which has been described as "Robert X. Cringely with a hard-on", you've come to the right place.
current column
"It's What for Dinner" -- Walker shifts gears in honor of the electorial melee: "...I can’t count the number of times I’ve wished I could chop the fiscal conservatives off the Republicans, the social liberals off the Democrats, and fuse them together to make a new party."
previous columns
"This Many Idiots Can't Be Wrong" - 11/8/00- "...there is one particular stupidity on my abortive list that I never get tired of making fun of. A less vulgar person might call it something like the 'problem of attribution,' but I like to call it the 'circle of bullshit,' and I believe it's responsible for almost all mankind's problems."
"Everyone Loves a Loser" - 11/1/00 - Ruminations on a society that rewards incompetence and sneers at the uber-successful.
"So Stupid It Just Might Suck" - 10/25/00 - Is there no idea so lame that high tech entrepreneurs won't pony up the "mad cheddar" for it? The Doctor vivisects VC vapidity and various other veracity-challenged... val... vin... (aw, vuck it) and other stuff.
"You Want Information To Be Free" - 10/18/00 - Piracy to the left of him, Napster to the right! Get stuck in the middle with Walker as he crams the "free net music" genie back in the bottle...
"A Dollar for Ninety Cents" - 10/11/00 - Doc Walker climbs back into the ring versus e-commerce
"The Cathedral and the Bizarre" - 10/4/00 - "...I'm just going to fucking come out and say it - I think open-source development is the stupidest idea since cosmetic rectoplasty."