Street roots
7
April 1, 2014
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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."