Idiots Write About Sports

I forgot the wackiest part of yesterday’s Giants-Phillies game: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was sung by — get this — a laptop.

It was part of a cross-promotion deal with Wired’s NextFest (that’s Wired Magazine of Conde Nast, not Marty’s Wired.com of Lycos), an event this weekend in San Francisco featuring crazy tech stuff that doesn’t really work very well (or at all!), like flying cars and invisibility cloaks and dancing robots.

Apparently there’s a program that lets you create computer-generated singing. I have to admit, the “singer” was pretty decent, given how much I hate the sound of my Mac’s synthesized voices, which haven’t evolved since the mid-’90s.

But the best part was the reaction to the singing laptop. Boos! Audible boos from throughout the ballpark!

A roaming pack of neo-Luddites in the bleachers? Mac users angry about the appearance of Lou Seal using a Windows laptop? (No, check that — right-thinking Giants fans know that Lou Seal uses Windows, and hate him for it.) People who prefer Harvey Hindermeyer’s oddly accented version from Ken Burns’ “Baseball?”

No idea. But it was really, really funny.

Sorry I missed that. Did it sound anything like Carol Channing?

No, but I imagine that when she's dead, she'll sound a lot more like it.