APRIL 23rd - Poke Me. That is a lot of Dollars

VIDEO NSFW



On this day last year, Facebook announced it’s 1st Quarter Results for 2014. Revenue for the company was 2.5 billion dollars. Profit was 624 million dollars. Poke me! That is a lot of dollars. Like personal-ball-washer dollars. But aside from being able to spend money on such frivolities, it amazes me how pervasive Facebook has become in our society. I remember creating a profile months after it had started. I was a sophomore in college and thought the whole thing was pretty silly. Online profile? Virtual friends? Poke? But you never know what is going to hit and stick. Look at the snuggie. But now Facebook is bigger than leg warmers were in the 80’s. Bigger than The Beatles in the 60’s or Vanilla Ice was for that year in the 90’s. Bigger than Scrooge McDuck’s bank vault or Shaquille O’ Neal’s shoes. So it’s pretty big. Poke. Though the physical comparisons are probably off base because Facebook is virtually big, not physically big. If Facebook were a character in Nintendo’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out it would be more Little Mac than King Hippo; though, it would probably be Mike Tyson what with his name being on the game and all. I’m sure their campus or office or whatever they call it is sufficiently imposing, but they are mainly a virtual company. They deal in virtual space on the interwebs and buy other virtual companies to expand their virtual empire. Poke. Virtual, physical, real, imagined. $624 million makes it all pretty insignificant. That is a lot of dollars. And not virtual dollars. Poke.

This day has been Marked.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AUGUST 22nd - Don't Drink the Kool-Aid

On this day in 1911, somebody working at the Louvre discovered that the Mona Lisa was missing. The previous day, a Monday--meaning the museum was closed to the public, Vincenzo Peruggia, a maintenance worker, brazenly walked out of the Louvre with what would eventually become the most famous painting in the world. Vincenzo basically sat on the painting for two years until he was caught trying to “return” it to his homeland of Italy in a misguided demonstration of Italian patriotism. The theft itself is quite interesting, mostly because of the lack of planning and preparation that went into it, but equally intriguing is the part it played in making the Mona Lisa so famous. Many historians feel that the painting reached new heights because it was stolen. It kind of makes sense in that whole “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone" kind of way. Not that I would suggest staging a kidnapping to allow your significant other to realize how much he/she loves you, because that’s jus
Read more

AUGUST 23rd - History of the One-Way

Image
On this day in 1617, the idea of the one-way street was supposedly introduced in London in the alleys near the River Thames. I’m not sure why London was on the cutting edge of traffic direction, though Albemarle Street, which is acknowledged as the first one-way street, was designated as such because the scientific lectures given there in the early 1800s were so popular. Why wouldn't they be? I can’t really imagine why a one-way street in 1617 would be necessary, but then I can’t really imagine what London in 1617 was like at all. I’m fresh out of people to interview too. Unless the Highlander is real. Just as well. Interviews take a long time. And the person inevitably goes off on tangents. Look, I’m sure the story of how you “accidentally” ingested psychedelic mushrooms while trekking across the Pacific Northwest in your hippie days and met your first wife, Wind Lover, is an incredible story, but I merely asked if you were currently married. It’s a yes or no question. Without the
Read more

OCTOBER 23rd - A Blink of the Cosmic Eye

On this day in 1977, American paleontologist, Elso S. Barghoorn, announced the discovery of some algae microfossils, complete with some super-scientific name and some super-scientific qualifiers, that were 3.4 billion years old. In layman’s terms--really freaking old. Interestingly enough October 23 was also thought, for a long time, to be the day on which the Earth was created. In 1650, church leaders interpreted that the bible documents Earth’s creation on October 23, 4004 BC. Also a long time ago. Not quite the 3.4 billion years of the first life-forms, or the 4.5 billion years most scientist believe the Earth has been around for. So old Barghoorn may have been giving a little nod there, as in “I’ll take your 5700 years and raise you a few billion.” In any case, it shows that we are here but for a blink of the cosmic eye. Stuff has been around so long that if you really start to think about it, you start feeling like you are watching first 30 minutes of The Tree of Life and wonderi
Read more