Behold!
As I was trudging back to my skull-shaped volcano lair, I got wind of Apple Co's greatest foray into the realm of smugness since they coined the term "genius bar". Yes, the design for their new HQ in Cupertino, California is a giant round circle with a great big park in the middle. The building is designed to counter the hierarchy and patriarchy that I love, safely relegating the sharp corners of the crossing pathways within its borders where it cowers in shame for manliness.
And to top it all off, it is built upon some new green (shudder! how I loathe that word!) technology. There are solar panels and probably tiny windmills for knocking birds out of the sky. The parking lot is appropriately hidden underground so Google Earth satellite photos will not reveal how these ecopuritan tools actually drive to work in Hummers running on the blood of spotted owls.
Of course, no matter how much these fools want green technology to be a real thing (and AGW for that matter), there is no getting around the sad fact that, if it works at all, it usually comes at a terrible price: mercury in the home, strip-mining for rare-earth minerals in China (where the largest deposits lie), starvation in poorer third-world nations, and hairy hippies luxuriating on your lawn.
PUT YOUR DAMN PANTS ON, YOU DIRTY HIPPIES OR I'LL OPEN THE LAVA SLUICE!!
But to be fair, homeless hippies setting up camp in your lawn is general condition in the People's Republic of California.
In the end, the technology will fail, like it always does, and fourteen months after the building is complete, after the Great Californian Distopia, it will experience new life as the world's largest roller derby rink. I suppose if I ever start wearing a monocle and end up adopting it as my trademark symbol, I might consider buying this monstrosity as a second diabolical lair of villainy. But for all their old-timey flair and sophistication, monocles are hardly fearsome or awe-inspiring.
For the time being, I am sticking with skulls. A decision which no doubt will lower the resale value of Job's attempt at a not-computer thing.
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