Untitled Document

12 April 2006

The Sofa King

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail with a picture embedded in the text. Technology has really marched on. It used to be that the pictures came as attachments to the e-mail files, and had to be downloaded separately.

Hackers loved that. They could send intriguing spam notes out with purportedly lurid or important information attached to them. “Your statement is ready,” was one that I recall, and of course everyone was up for the latest Paris Hilton titillation.

But those were bad things to open at the office, or where inappropriate eyes might see, and besides, the hackers often planted little Trojan programs in the enclosures, which my downloading, you gave permission to infect your computer, and turn it into a zombie, controlled from afar.

Then it would mail itself to everyone in your address book, replicating itself, or collect all your keystrokes with passwords and bank account information and mail itself out surreptitiously in the night.

You have to like Paris Hilton a lot to risk that, and I don't know anyone who has ever admitted to downloading that video of her and Tommy Lee.

Or maybe I am getting her confused with Anna Korikova. So much to do, so much to download. So little time.

Anyhow, now that pictures can be placed right into e-mail everything is fine, and you can see all manner of things just by reading the mail. I can tell the ones-the latest thing is to have random paragraphs of convoluted prose that doesn't make any sense, but which leads you, inexorably, into some awful interlude with Paris Hilton, or some not quite as scintillating and intelligent.

So my pal sent me a picture from the streets of New York. It could be any big American city, but it is clear that it can only be from one of the Five Boroughs. Queens, maybe, or Brooklyn.

A delivery truck is in the image, cut off at the top, and traffic is whizzing around, caught in frozen animate flight. The light is that which is reflected from the combination of dirty white paint and black asphalt. There is advertising on the truck, the stylized images you see so often that they mostly invisible. There is a cartoon blue Couch, and a caricature of a King. It is not a frightening as the frozen-faced mannequin in the Burger King commercials, actually just sort of a smiling dumb cartoon guy with a vacuous smile.

Across the top is the legend “Sofa King,” and below it is the motto.

“Our Prices are Sofa King low!”

I looked at it and then looked back at the title. What was this about? I see this crap all over town. We have Tire Cities, and Beverage Universes. I figure anyone can be a king, if they want if they can afford the pain. But the title of the e-mail told me to think about it three times.

I'm not sure I can think about anything all the way through once in the morning, not until I have ingested at least half a pot of coffee, and I gazed at the picture blankly.

Then I turned off the computer and wandered off to work. I don't think it occurred to me what it meant until I was crossing the 14th Street Bridge. I just about side-swiped a Yellow Top cab.

It was Sofa King close.