Death Of Context

You may have noticed that I haven't written one of my legendary out-of-context texts posts in a few months. That's because of some pretty amazing recent developments. In the spirit of "Shit My Dad Says" and "Texts From Last Night" getting sitcom development deals, my own out-of-contexts have been optioned for a new series on ABC.

In the show, two buddies (Joey Lawrence, David Alan Grier) find themselves in possession of a magical smartphone that periodically spits out completely random text messages. Then, the pair are teleported to a mysterious universe that reflects the bizarre scenario outlined in these texts. With the help of a wizard (Andrew Dice Clay) and his apprentice witch daughter (Kathy Ireland, but only using archival footage of her from the early 1990's), the two pals have to figure out how to solve a problem presented by the text before they can return to their true reality. We're hoping we can land Ian McKellen to play the phone, but his asking price is ridiculous. Like, "if you want me to play a goddamn talking smartphone, you will have to pay through the nose" ridiculous. Provided Sir Ian signs on the dotted line, the show should be launched by midseason to replace any of ABC's sure-to-fail other shows. We're thinking probably Pan Am's timeslot once America gets fully creeped out from Christina Ricci's face. Has she always looked vaguely like E.T., or is this a recent development?

….okay, the preceding paragraph may not have been true. (The part about Ricci's face was true.) But no, there's no sitcom in development and I didn't cash in on my blog. The real reason for the lack of out-of-context texts is that cataloguing them all has become a bit of a chore. With my old, crappy phone, the inbox only held 50 messages at a time, so whenever I hit 50, I knew it was time to clean things out and write a post. With my Blackberry, however, I can essentially hold a limitless amount of texts, and they're all kept alive in specific threads, not a finite number of messages of which I can keep track.

Now, I guess there's no *reason* I couldn't continue the series. I'm still certainly getting odd messages and while it would just take more time and effort to catalogue them all, it's certainly not an impossible task. So basically it just comes down to laziness. But it's a metaphor! The Blackberry has made multitasking so easy in so many different ways, but ironically, it has kept me from completely this single task that brought so much joy to millions, thousands, hundreds, dozens, nay SOME people!

If you ever wanted to replicate the "out of context texts" experience, steal someone else's phone. Simple!

N.B. This is Mark's attorney. Mark is not actually advising you to steal a phone, nor is he endorsing theft in any way, nor is he liable if your phone actually does get stolen. Just ignore Mark. I personally find him insufferable, but hey, he pays his bills on time…or at least he will, once the money from this sitcom deal comes through.