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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (April 1, 2014)
Street roots 7 April 1, 2014 * > F o r th e A compilation o f facts, large and smalt, about our community • Justin Bieber’s favorite number: 6 • Number of felonies he could be facing after his shenanigans: 6 • Average age at which Bieber fans start engaging in shenanigans: 4 I Record number of shenanigans performed In an hour: 71 • Time it takes to complete a common shenanigan: 3.22 minutes • Number of people who admit to 1 three or more shenanigans a week: 1 out of 4 Skip Corkeystands in fro n t o f ju st one o f the mega-computers inside Facebook's Prineville datacenter This section, Corkey says, will be used to store the remaining privacy o f residents in Clackamas and Clatsop counties. • Longest shenanigan on record: 67.3 hours • Longest record: Ergo Phizmiz: “The Faust Cycle” • Length of ‘The Faust Cycle3*: 15 hours Your privacy? Facebook has it all locked up A mid growing concerns about Z % government surveiliance^m ai^^M Sc • Length of the play Faust: 2 hours, .X. A-privacy, F a re b o o k w letting8 customers- give or take a smoke break. know exactly w hat’s going on. • Number of "Portlandia” episodes dedicated to “Faust": 22 • Number of actors who have played Faust: Buttload • Average number of buttloads commonly employed in a shenanigan: 2 • Number of shenanigans in Faust: 1 • Point to all of this: 0 • The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay: 273 to 1 The North American Center for Shenanigans, Jersey City, New Jersey. “This is where we’re keeping your privacy,” said Skip Corkey, corporate communications director for Facebook- Oregon. “Oregonians don’t have to worry any longer. It’s right here, safe and sound.” Corkey is standing inside Facebook’s custom-built data center in Prineville, Ore., Where the personal information — including shopping habits, sexual proclivitiesand financial transactions — of more than 1 billion users is stored. Corkey said the company invested more than $200 million in constructing the 300,000 square-foot facility, showing Just how im portant protecting consumers’ personal information is to the social-media outfit. ' “Competition forcesus to be. good stewards of the public’s information,” Corkey said. “We often say around here that we don’t just love our customers, we ‘like’ them, too. And you can’t stop us,” he says, \ smiling. To better protect your privacy, the building is located .on an empty plain outside of Prineville, a town seldom seen by anyone but its 10,000 residents. Entrance to the TURGID, fro m page 9 nothing special about us, and we never passed around phqtos, we were just, like, the only two girls around and a lot of the guys there were I think pretty lonely and shy in real life. We never-cared and typically politely ignored it, but, you know, it was an RPG chatroom, so a lot of it was over the top. One guy I’ll always rem em ber did everything softly. “*Softly looks into your' eyes as he smiles softly and says softly, “Hi”*” I mean, they were all mostly nice about it, but it was relentless, constant, and even blunt “I’m sorry, I’m not interested, I’m ju s t here to hang out” wouldn’t work because to a lpt of them it meant, “Not right now, but keep trying and be SUPER flattering arid maybe *sigh wistfully as you look at me* and I might change my mind.” Anyway, my friend decided she was going to facility is resèryèd for authorized personnel. T he media was granted special access for one day only. The building, virtually windowless, is surrounded By cement panels that hum. Corkey said the facility is state-of-the-art for Facebook employees as well, and even - includes a theater where staffers can watch videos, photograph food and simply unwind; Thè media was not allowed inside the theater. The data center and hundreds of similar facilities across the country mark a new investment in customer service by Facebook. This amid concerns the platform was losing its edge with viewers. Just last create an alter-ego boyfriend for both of us to get them to leave us alone with the constant messages. We’figured if we were “taken”, we’d be off the market, right? But qs we’re fashioning this “perfect fake boyfriend”, we decide, fuck it, and created Alejandro Urbane (Fabio!), who we would take turns role-playing the account as, and never wore anything except billowy shirts and tight pants, and had his lustrous, lion-like mane of blonde hair combed back to wave in the wind and also hide his bald spot. Alejandro would “look at you with eyes flinty and hard like chipped bathroom tiles in the public restroom*” and “whisper setily into your ear about taking you to McDonald’s later, but you have to pay because his wallet won’t fit in his pants” and the like, and he also did everythingturgidly. Everything. Because turgid was a funny word. “Sighs turgidly.” Whenever some guy started hitting on one of us month it was learned that Facebook intended to drop the term “users” when referring to suberibers given its association with substance abuse. An internal memo accidentally downloaded by the David Douglass High School newspaper says the social-media outift is hoping to distance itself from any association to the stupor-inducing and socially polarizing attributes of the drug heroin. “We concede that, in fact, our 1:2 billion ‘users’ aren’t really using Facebook for anything of real significance anyway,” the memo states. “They’re simply maintaining.” and wasn’t taking the hint, the other would go off, hop on Alejandro’s account, and swoop in and croon about how his ahs were rippling like a baby’s bottom and wé would swoon and fall all over him. Funnily enough, while some guys (typically the ones who were quick to accuse us of being lesbians for not wanting to role-play porn or romances with them ) were annoyed, pretty much everyone loved Alejandro and thought he was a lot of fun. He was every deliberately campy, poorly written sexual stereotype we couíd think of, arid those writing snippets sound like what would have happened had we taken the joke to its logical conclusion and created a pen name for Alejandro so “he”, could write had erotica with names like “DANGER ZONE” and hire some guy to lounge on the cover of a motorcycle magazine. Be did everything turgidly. - Everything. Because targld .was a tunny word. ■ "Sighs turgidly."
