There are places in the world so antagonistic toward all forms of life that little if anything lives there, plant or animal. Often located in deserts, we give these places names like Death Valley, Needles, and Parumph. Deserts. Deserted by all forms of life. Too hot or too cold. Too dry. Too bright or too dark. So what do we…
If you’re looking for the American dream, you might find it’s retreated to sitcoms. It’s taken a pounding lately, and sitcoms offer it, and us, a little oasis of comfort. Maybe the dream has become more a mirage. If so, it’s a very attractive one. Sitcoms feature comfortable lives with manageable problems. They are brightly lit, vividly colored. Their houses…
Like most people, I used to be wary of marketers. They sell useless stuff to people that don’t need it. A marketing colleague pointed out to me that you can’t sell someone something they don’t want. But that was my point; marketers make people want stuff that they happen to have right there ready to sell to them. Granted, it’s a…
The term ‘classic’ in reference to deodorant means something completely different compared to its use when talking about cars or iPods*. And when it comes to rock music, at first the term seems uniquely inconsistent. Popular music from the seventies of the sort found on LP records is termed classic. But then, so is music from the 90’s, particularly if…
I sometimes walk to the coffee shop, when the weather is not too wet, or too warm, or when I don’t need to carry anything too heavy and so on. Sometimes, I will ride my bike. Walking or riding, I find I’m often chastised for not wearing the exercise-appropriate clothing. Certainly, I see people arrive for a flat white latte…
You have to feel sorry for doctors, don’t you? Or rather, you don’t but maybe you should. They are about the only people that get absolutely no sympathy when they’re feeling a bit unwell. A doctor calling in sick sounds ridiculous even before you hear the excuse. And although it’s nice to have a doctor who is experienced, you don’t…
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is one of the many things Shakespeare made up as part of a story, and that we now regard as gospel. Of course not everyone follows his advice, and that’s a good thing for libraries which would otherwise have been a non-starter. There are people who consider lending and borrowing to be immoral,…
When they were purely mechanical, without logic chips and firmware and all those added controls and options, fruit machines were great. One-arm bandits that you knew would take your money but you got a little entertainment in return. You thought that the way the reels were lined up before you played, or the way you pulled the handle, or even…
Knobs are our fundamental interface with the world of gadgets, aren’t they? When the very first gadget was invented — let’s say it was some sort of a knife or a club — it was surely given a handle as a means to make it available to a human user. Now we have more sophisticated gadgets; washing machines, televisions, computers…
Tech visionaries the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates tell us their biggest fear for the future is not going broke, it’s robots. We laugh. Those geeks are so consumed by the white heat of technology, what do they know? But robots are here among us already, quietly preparing for that same apocalypse the Gates’s and the Musks foretell. These…