I Can't Believe It's Been 25 Years. You Look Awful.

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for June is called, "Glad Tidings," and I bet has the fewest rhymes of any song you will hear all week. In fact, if there was company that delivered mom jeans to your house, the name of that company, Jordache Door Dash, would have more rhymes than this entire song.

Speaking of mom jeans, I attended my (gulp) 25th College Reunion last weekend. (By the way, that gulp was because I am chugging bubble tea, not because I am trying to draw attention to how many years it has been since I was in college.) I'm not really good with names or faces, but I developed a trick for identifying people who were in my class. If they had the same amount of hair loss as me, I would run up to them and hug them tightly, and I was right 100% of the time.

But for the most part, it was a pretty similar experience to my 10-year reunion and the 15-year reunion that I skipped. In each case, I found myself having to reiterate the same tedious stories about my life to everyone that I was hugging tightly. This time, it seemed like the only alumni who showed up were members of the Reunion Committee, and all they wanted to do was convince me to donate money to the University. 

Wouldn't it be great, they would say, if you gave enough money to tear down the old Science Library and have the torn down library renamed after your family?

One of them even asked if I wanted to make a Legacy Donation? I'm sorry, did you say a Legacy Donation? If that's what I think it is, ew. I'm perfectly happy with the two kids I made the old-fashioned way, and I'm not about to go into some sterile lab full of dirty magazines and donate a bunch of "Legacy" to a stranger.

Anyway, for the 1300 members of the Class of '97 who had the wisdom to stay home, I still think we should catch each other up. Should I go first? Okay, it looks like I'm going first. Here are some of the updates I gave some of my classmates about my career path:

1. I'm the editor-in-chief for The Middle England Journal of Medicine. We only publish 500-year-old research, such as observational studies on bloodlettings, trepanation, and methods for draining yellow bile. 

If I'm being honest, I think people go out of their way to support us because they we are a competitor to the New England Journal of Medicine, and most people just really hate the Patriots.

2. I work for Amazon as the Director of Flatus Skills. Have you ever asked Alexa to play 30 minutes of gentle farts to help you sleep? My division recorded that fart library.

3. I work for the government, and that's all I'm authorized to tell you. (Two drinks later, I spill the beans. You ever wave your hands under a soap dispenser in an airport bathroom, and no soap comes out? You assume it's broken, or maybe just empty, right? Wrong, idiot. The government puts fake soap dispensers in every airport, and they have sensors in them to scan your hands. Then, when you leave the bathroom, we already have your fingerprints when we arrest you for not washing your hands with soap.)

4. I name ski hills. Sigh. Back in Wisconsin, everyone told me how amazing my ski hill names were. They'd be like, "You're the guy who came up with Battle-Hardened and Tenth Youth? That's amazing!" But I had bigger dreams, and that meant moving out to Colorado. I know the competition would tough, but I had no idea it would be this cutthroat. Aspen only opens a few new runs a year, and pretty much everyone out here was the best ski hill-namer in their home state. I'm not giving up on my dream, but for now I'm waiting tables at the slope-side restaurant to pay the bills.

5. I rice things. You know, like cauliflower. Cauliflower doesn't just rice itself, you know.

6. I work for Apple. Mostly my division tries to figure out how to make your old iPhone break when the new one comes out. Everyone knows that old phones slow down when we release new versions of the operating system, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. What most people don't know is that iPhones also get slipperier after 2 years, so you are more likely to drop them. Also, cell phones cause brain tumors, and we place those tumors in specific nuclei to encourage reckless spending.

7. It's kind of embarrassing, but for a while after college, I was working as an erotic baker. But then I moved to the Midwest and now I design corn mazes. Erotic corn mazes.

8. I work for the state legislature, but every bill I have written has been wildly unpopular. It might be because they all start with, "You know what your problem is?"

9. I invented an app called the Whole Enchiladle. It's like Worldle, Quordle, and Octordle, but instead of trying to guess 1, 4, or 8 words, you need to guess all the words. All 158,390 five-letter words in the English language. 

10. I make those funny T-shirts that everybody has. They're definitely funny, but also wise. Here's one you probably know: "A skateboard is just a roller bag where you're the bag." That one cracks everybody up, but it also makes you think.  

11. I give the most elite conservative congressman money to vote for legislation that benefits Hobby Lobby. It's not really a career, per se. I just do it in my free time, and I use my own money. So I guess you could say I'm a Snobby Hobby Lobby Lobbyist Hobbyist.

12. I'm just here for the Port-a-Potty Convention. Lots of great Port-a-Potties out here tonight, and such a cool coincidence that so many people I went to college with showed up also!

Anyway, I would love to hear from the rest of you! Class of '97 rules! (Also note: Class of '98 drools.)

With Warmest Regards,
Zach

Learning to Code

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for June is called "The Cross-Examination of the Bee." This is the third and final song about the on-again, off-again feud between The Elephant and The Bee.

I have a challenge for you. Name Apple's all-time top competitor.

You might be thinking of Google, Microsoft, or Samsung. Maybe you'll reach back a few years and come up with Dell, Palm, or even IBM.

Nope. Many of these companies have managed to grab some of the market share, but saying they have a genuine turf war with Apple is like saying the Cleveland Browns have a rivalry with anyone. It's not a rivalry unless there's a history, and both sides are emotionally invested. As far as I am concerned, there is only one competitor that ever came close to matching Apple toe-to-toe. Commodore.

The Londons were a loyal Commodore family. We early-adopted the living hell out of the Commodore 64 in 1983.  Something had to fill the ten year void between the death of Orson Welles and the birth of Miley Cyrus, and the C64 did so charmingly. As soon as I touched its sleek, tan little body, I knew that I was laying my hands on the future. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture the 21st century, all I could imagine was people with Commodore keyboards and disk drives taped to their torsos. For some reason, these people always had shiny, asymmetric hairdos and button-down shirts with triangle patterns.

We set up the C64 in the pantry; the computer room hadn't been invented yet. The first time we plugged it in, I painstakingly typed "PLAY PAC MAN" and hit return.

?SYNTAX ERROR

Okay, that was disappointing. But then I realized that this was just the Commodore's way of saying, "I love you. Keep trying. We'll get through this together."

Soon I learned to speak its exotic language. There is nothing as simple, as perfect, or as elegant as BASIC. It only utilized capital letters, so everything you typed looked like shouting. This felt very natural to my seven-year-old brain.

Within a year, I was programming unique interactive games, like this one:

10 PRINT "DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY WITH LOTS OF DOO-DOO";: INPUT A$
20 IF A$ = "YES" GOTO 40
30 GOTO 10
40 PRINT "YOU ARE RIGHT ABOUT HOW MUCH DOO-DOO YOU PLAY WITH"
50 GOTO 10

Soon, I was writing programs that were hundreds of lines long. Interactive adventure games with complex environments, graphics and music. There were just so many creative ways to accuse the user of playing with doo-doo!

Notice that I have not used the word code. The first time I ever heard someone use that word in reference to computer programming was years later, when I was in college. My freshman roommate was a computer science major, and he found a way to use word at least once in every sentence. "We have to code a system that tells an imaginary elevator what floor to go to. I have to write 500 lines of code by Monday. If anyone calls while I'm coding, tell them I'll get back to them when I finish all my lines of code." Come on, Josh. What are you, a military cryptographer?

My son turned eight this month, and he expressed interest in learning to write computer programs, so we downloaded this amazing bit of software called Scratch. It's a kid-friendly programming platform designed by the good folks at M.I.T. Malcolm thinks it's pretty cool, but I am OBSESSED. Somehow, for nearly 30 years, I forgot how much I loved doing this. Now I can't remember ever wanting to do anything else.

Here's something I've been working on for a little over a week. I gave it the dorkiest 80s video game title I could come up with. If you want to actually play it, download Scratch and I'll email you the file.

With warmest regards,
Zach