The Machinery of Night

Posted 9:24 PM by Angie Schultz

Microsoft Vandalized My Town!

"Reuters" (aka "One Man's News Service Is Another Man's Running Joke That Will Not Die") reports that Clueless Gits, Inc (aka Microsoft) has paid a whopping $50 (that's right, fifty, five-oh, half a C-note) fine for slapping butterfly decals around New York. "Reuters" goes on to note that

Microsoft also drew the ire of municipal authorities in Sydney, Australia, after it spray-painted the logo of its Xbox video game console on the city's streets.

Damn right it did. This was a few weeks after September 11 (yes, I'm going to drag 9/11 into it---watch me). One morning a bunch of spray-painted images sprung up around Randwick. They were black boxes with a green logo much like the one on these shoes. In other words, they were like the Xbox logo, except that they did not say "Xbox".

I probably hadn't heard of Xbox, and I certainly hadn't seen this logo. I didn't know it was a logo for several days. I didn't know what the hell it was; for all I knew it was the sign of the Etoiles Verts, an Algerian terrorist organization (that I just made up). After a day or two I noticed that they had a little "TM" in the corner, and I realized they were advertisements for something or other. When the bus shelter ads came out I finally knew what the spray paint was for.

This really pissed me off. Randwick was always being defaced with some shit or other; there was quite a bit of ordinary graffiti, and one Monday morning we woke up to find "$cumbags" stencilled in front of the banks and the shopping center. Down with capitalism! But I figured that surely Microsoft wouldn't have done this without the permission of the Randwick Council, right? Right? Wrong, apparently.

The ads stayed until they wore away, except for the one in front of the Coach and Horses pub; they scrubbed that baby away in a couple days. Hope they billed Microsoft for the work.

In the ordinary course of things, I would love this logo. It's a star. It's in black and lime green---which, as we know, are two great colors that go great together. I might well have bought a pair of those shoes just for the great logo. But not now.

$cumbags.