Okay, I’ve got as big a soft spot for man’s best friend as the next guy. Or, maybe I don’t.
But umbrellas for dogs?
Do the umbrella manufacturers of the world really need to put on a night shift to crank out cute little parasols which are fastened by way of a wraparound, velcro-tightened thing which goes up and over the doggie’s torso? Am I missing something, or did God not already make arrangements to keep dogs relatively dry in a rainstorm by covering them with fur? That’s fur as in f-u-r; the stuff we can make coats out of, or used to. Yeah, that stuff.
I truly am glad that there are people in the world who spend their time thinking up groovy new things (such as words like groovy) but I really wonder when the day will come when someone somewhere will declare, as someone actually did in the 1890s, that everything that can be invented, has been invented. Will that be a hundred years from now, a thousand?
Ask yourself this simple question. Do you need a radio built into your toaster? In fact, is there anything now that radios can’t be built into? They’re in flashlights and toolboxes and shower stalls. How long before your favourite station starts churning out the hits the moment you sit down on your touch-sensitive toilet seat and stops when you stand up? The only thing, in fact, that they are not building radios into – are radios.
TVs built into the outside of refrigerator doors. Is this a good idea? In a 24-hour period, how many minutes or seconds do you actually stand in front of your closed fridge door? Like radios, TV screens are popping up everywhere. In the backs of the seats in new vans and, of course, on telephones. This must seem pretty crazy to someone still around who remembers the days before radio and TV, but even to someone such as me who didn’t see a TV in our home till I was seven and when it did arrive it was encased in a big wooden box in the corner of the living room, the big black phone being attached to the wall kitty corner from that, this stuff is a heck of an adjustment.
Do we need car windshield ice scrapers that take 12-volt batteries and bring the benefit of their heat to the glass? I guess we do. What about battery-powered, water-shooting teeth flossers. Pick me up a couple, would ya mind?
A computer mouse that massages your hand as you move it around is just the ticket. Why didn’t I think of that? I could have retired last year.
I don’t have an MP3 player yet, but someday I’ll probably get one. When I do, I might just pick up the new one that is roughly the size of a silver dollar and holds hundreds of songs. It has twice the memory of the Apple computer I paid $4,000 for in 1994 and which is so heavy it would have still been sitting on my desk if Hurricane Katrina had blown my house away.
Everything is digital. Cameras, of course. But also thermometers, pedometers, odometers, barometers and whateverometers. Digital weigh scales. Clocks, watches, voice recorders. And what isn’t digital is motorized – toothbrushes, screwdrivers, pencil sharpeners. Bicycles. Kids’ lifesized toy cars.
Something that is coming, that I only recently heard about and didn’t completely take in, are miniature DVD screens on tombstones. At a touch, relatives will once again be able to hear their loved one’s voice, see them in their younger days, in an old home video. Okay, I guess, as long as the video is not X-rated. Like the poor mom in Peterborough whose daughter pawned her videorecorder, but forgot to take out the tape, a tape which showed mother being kind of unmotherly, if you know what I mean. In this day of instant video distribution, of course, Mom’s movie was soon playing in every home theatre in town.
A problem pre-video camera people – you know, we hair-covered cavemen – never had to worry about.
©2005 Jim Hagarty
