Being of a Certain AARP-Qualified Age, we remember Pong. We remember the night it showed up at Charlie’s Pool Hall on Willamette, everybody gathered around it like the crowd watching the Close Encounters Mothership land: Oooooooooh. We also remember, not that many years later, being stoned beyond belief and killing at Centipede, after which we gave up on videogames forever, because really, once you’ve achieved satori, there’s no going back.

So yeah, we remember the Golden Age of video arcades. And what we remember doesn’t sound like this:

The idea here, according to the OAK-U-TRON’s designers, is to capture the feel of the arcade era, when gaming was an inherently social venture.

If by “social” you mean that we all hung out at Charlie’s on weekend evenings, sure. But if you’re trying to suggest that it was a cooperative atmosphere, you never bore the brunt of Karl’s glee when he whipped yer ass at Breakout. Videogames were just a new way to fail before your peers.

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Your humble correspondent was humbled even further last night when I asked this question on Twitter:

Can somebody rerack #stopkony / Invisible Children for me: what the hell IS this? #help

And thus began an hour-long descent into madness — watching the Kony 2012 film, getting terribly moved and excited, and twittering my support.  And then, the thought of actually forking over money for The Cause crossed my mind.

And then a little voice began to whisper, and then shout: “STOP. You don’t know these guys from Adam.  And how much of this money is going straight into the group’s pizza-and-beer fund, anyway?”

And then the hope and empowerment and all that new-age crap turned into doubt, and cynicism, and then out-and-out disdain.  It culminated tonight with the heads of the group getting all mushy about “what happens next,” and why only a third of the donated dough actually goes to efforts on the ground in Africa — all as told to Piers Morgan on his Hour of Gab.

So, the final verdict (after all of 24 hours, mind you) is this: Stop Kony?  Sure.  But the holier-than-thou, preening minds behind it all can GET BENT.

All of this is terribly complicated.  They’re doing a service, surely.  But they’re getting famous.  And they are going to get a shitload of money coming in.  And nobody knew who they were on Monday.  In the immortal words of Vince Lombardi: “WHAT DE HELL IS GOING ON OUT HERE?!”  Some thoughts, post-jump.

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I forget, is this the fifth or the sixth sign of the Apocalypse?

[Big Government]

“The Catholic Diocese of Sacramento no longer will fund programs at Francis House, a nonprofit agency that serves homeless people, because of its new director’s views supporting abortion rights and gay marriage.” [Sacramento Bee, via @pourmecoffee]

“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.” [NYT]

We never met Derrick Bell. But we were around.

Bell came to Eugene in 1980, our senior year, as the new dean of the University of Oregon law school — and one of the first black deans of a non-black law school in the nation. Everybody was so proud, because that’s the kind of thing Eugene likes to be proud about.

Especially when a single black family moving to town would significantly increase Eugene’s diversity quotient. We were all nice people. But in Eugene, we were predominately nice white people.

Or, as we liked saying at the time: It’s easy to be Tolerant when there’s little to bother being Tolerant about.

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