Recently in Lit, Flicks, and Pop Culture Hits Category

I don't know why we have discussions like this at the kitchen table. We could talk about literature, or art, or even about the latest Lindsey Lohan shenanigans. OK, not the last - that would really put me off my feed. But we frequently enter philosophical realms, trying to determine the worst final words one could utter or the exact definition of primi piatti (yes that was an actual discussion last night). Perhaps it's all a modern version of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Anyway, we came up with some examples of undesirable last words:

"I wonder what this does?"

"Oh, crap!"

"Oops"

"That's odd."

"I got it, I got it!"

"It's probably just a rash."

"What could go wrong?"

"Hey honey - get a picture of me with this bear!"

"Yes, I'm pretty sure there are no poisonous snakes in this state!"

"The water does not look that deep."

"Hey, watch this!"

"Are you sure the electricity is off?"

And of course, the ever popular "Yes, I can do that with my eyes closed!"

I fear my last words will probably be something in the 'oops' category. Maybe a combo, like "oops, followed immediately by "Oh, crap!" or "Sonofa..."

Mary's final words I imagine will be "Didn't I tell you to read the instructions first?"

I thought I'd continue with the engineering theme for a while, because they say 'write about what you know' and also 'a penny saved is a penny earned', and lets not forget 'never pat a burning dog'*. To these we should add 'don't fool around with microwave emitting magnetrons while you have a chocolate bar in your pants'. Wives get very unhappy when they have to clean melted chocolate out of pant pockets. I've heard this from other people.

Gizmodo has a list of ten greatest accidental inventions of all time. I fear I must quibble a bit with their designation. While I think that Play-Doh, and the Slinky are admirable products, I don't really think they qualify as greatest inventions. The world would, it's true, be a somewhat sadder and greyer place without the joys of Play-Doh and Slinkies but somehow I think we would manage to soldier on. On the other hand, microwave ovens, man! Do you remember what it was like to have to make popcorn in a hot air popcorn maker? Of course you don't! That's because Percy Spencer (you did read the article, right?) sacrificed his chocolate bar in his quest to bring us the ultimate popcorn maker and left-over warming device. Not to mention the fun we now can have with marshmallows (please note that I'm not advocating placing marshmallows in the microwave to see what happens, as the results are terribly hard to clean up, unless, of course you can do it and not get caught), not available to our distant ancestors, cooking their food over open fires or at least an electric range.

Interesting divertissement. Ever wonder why a stove is also called a range? Apparently at one point a stove referred to a device that had one hot spot or burner. A range had multiple burners, possibly a reference to an 'arrangement'. Moving on....

All hail engineers! We rule! We're also a strange people, what with our insistence on measuring stuff, calculating weight distributions, and all that graphing. And don't get me started on Electrical Engineers. But we do have our good points. For instance, we can hook up your surround sound system to your big screen TV and even get rid of that blinking 12:00 on the DVD display. Afterwards, of course, don't feel really obligated to invite us to stay and watch the football game with you and the other guys. We understand. And besides, there's a Babylon Five marathon on this afternoon, so its all good.

Our newest, and not by any means biggest, engineering marvel comes to us today via Consumerist. Inside we find a Boeing engineer who has constructed a complete and totally functional living space in a mere 182 square feet. Which in engineering speak is 16.91 square meters. Which in normal human speak is really small.

I love this kind of thing. Of course, I'm an engineer or was an engineer or will always be an engineer in my heart of hearts, (or is it hearts of heart and does it make any difference?) depending on which way you swing, philosophically speaking. Obviously a pico dwelling like this is not for the claustrophobic. I, on the other hand would really like it. Maybe not all the time. Or most of the time. Or more than a few hours, here and there. But I would like it. I like multifunction stuff be it Murphy beds, Leathermans, or pens that also double as micro sound recorders.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw this out there as a little idea of what would happen if you allowed us engineers to design your living spaces. They'd be efficient, compact, though perhaps not well suited for those of you who think life requires sufficient space to hold out your arms to their fullest extension, while not oriented precisely in an ESE direction, 20.3 centimeters from the front door. Those people will just have to try and live their wretched lives in a big echoing mansion with just tons of wasted space on all sides. Sorry. Oh, and your microwave display is still blinking 12:00.

We recently went to a ball game here with the Colorado Rockies, the first game in fact that we've attended since we moved to Colorado. We're not exactly huge sports fans. Actually we're not any kind of sports fans. We like the sitting outdoors, eating hotdogs, and drinking beer thing. Watching people hit balls with sticks and run around is just the ambiance as far as we're concerned.

First, the ballpark food run down (priorities, you know). Shockingly standard food items for sale in the main. No fish tacos, or garlic fries, or grilled salmon sandwiches? What the heck?

Well, there is the Denver Cheese Steak. I didn't even know there was a Denver Cheese steak. And no wonder - it comes in steak or chicken versions. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but doesn't cheese steak come with - steak? Perhaps I'm being too much a purist. Nope, pretty sure I'm not.

Via Boing Boing, comes an interesting flash-back to those halcyon days of yore when engineers were men, and nothing but men, and completely clueless about how things like physiology, and biology, and human interaction actually work. Not that that would stop engineers from designing an apparatus for assisting women with childbirth. Better birth through engineering!

See, this centrifugal force apparatus for facilitating child birth is just the kind of thing that an engineer would come up with. Because an engineer came up with it. Even if the inventors weren't engineers per se, they think like engineers and so ergo sum ipso facto e pluribus unum, they are engineers. Engineers see a problem, even when the evidence is overwhelming that there is in fact, no problem, and devise a solution for it. It's what we do. Especially if we can develop extremely detailed illustrations for the proposed problem solution.

I love this thing. It's wonderful in a really bad, mad scientist way. The apparatus looks perfectly terrifying. Just imagine wheeling a woman in labor into the room that contains this puppy and telling her they're going to strap her in, spin her up to generate a few G's of centrifugal force, and out pops the newborn, to be caught in a 'newborn net'. No doctors needed, because engineers are on the case. Of course it'll be in a soundproof room because who wants to be disturbed by the hysterical ravings of a terrified pregnant woman. Not me, sir, thanks very much.

So, I think this invention will join the pantheon of things, which is quite large by the way, that illustrate why engineers should be closely supervised. Or at least looked in on periodically.

Klickity klackity is the sound of obsolescence. Gather round kids, while we take a trip down memory lane. Not too close, now, the drop off on either side is a killer.

So one morning this week, at the breakfast table, I was swooshing around the Internet on my iPad, checking out the digital future and all, while Mary was wrestling with old-school style newsprint. As it had probably been something in excess of twelve hours since the last time I had rubbed in the fact that I had an iPad, I noted that the news I was reading was a good deal fresher than that old printed stuff of Mary's, which had to be hours out of date, now. Mary, while conceding that old fashioned newspapers might not be as current and up to the minute as news delivered wirelessly, when rolled into a tube they were still quite effective in delivering disciplinary lessons to bad dogs and recalcitrant husbands.

Anyhow, after bobbing and weaving a bit, the discussion, what there was of it that did not consist of 'ow, stop that', moved on to the touchscreen keyboard sported by the iPad. I noted that I had seen yet another set of comments from people bemoaning how difficult it was to type on the iPad. Me, I've found I pretty much like the iPad virtual keyboard, certainly more than I suspected I would initially.

One of the joys I get from reading many of these slightly creaky stories is the weird and wonderful collision of the technological aspects of super-science with a social milieu that has stayed pretty much completely static. And by static, I mean firmly embedded in the middle part of the twentieth century.

For instance, in one story characters are flitting about town in aerial taxis and video-calling each other (how quaint, I believe we call this FaceTime now). One of the characters spends the evening in a club, which serves a swanky dinner and a show, complete with a torch singer and a big band. Oh, and he's dressed to the nines too with dinner jacket and such, because that's what classy guys do in the future.

There's just something endlessly amusing about worlds of the future in which people still come home after a hard day at the office pushing buttons (heh - buttons!) on their Universal Integrators, and there's the wife waiting with a pitcher of very dry martinis. Of course, with cocktails everyone has to inhale a pack or two of unfiltered cigarettes, or a cigar, or both, simultaneously if at all possible. Meals seem to often offer either a profoundly large and bloody steak, possibly with a baked potato on the side, or meatloaf. Why meatloaf? I don't know, does anyone? No one in these stories eats tofu, or vegetarian, or organic. To be honest, in the Thirties was there even a concept of organic food that didn't involve something foraged from the wild? Of course, there was always the old meal in a pill concept that never made any sense to me what so ever.

Anyway, I kind of miss that stuff. Nowadays, authors who write science fiction are forever imagining future societies that are radically different than today's. Usually not for the better. Like megacorps requiring mandatory cranial implants to monitor your consumer wants and you get to live in a box 3 meters on a side. And most the time, you frequently don't even get the jetpack to compensate. It sucks.

So the latest apparent must-have technological advance is 3D TV. Just not seeing it this time. Personally, I don't care that much about 3D. Most of the time it really doesn't work for me, primarily because I have no discernible depth perception. I am also, as I am reminded on an almost daily basis (by Mary), lacking in both auditory and visual acuity (which is to say, I'm deaf as a post and blind as, well, a post too). Mary did succeed in getting me to visit with, and spend ridiculous sums of money on, an optometrist, but that was only because at arm's length books were no longer legible. So far I've managed to side step, avoid, delay, and obfuscate the hearing issues. But this is all a distraction from the main topic.

I think they're pushing this whole 3D thing too soon after the last tech upgrade. They need to space these things out a bit. Over the last half decade, people had to upgrade to flat screens. Then High Definition flat screens. Then big screen HD TV. I'm all for the latest and greatest when it comes to commercial electronics. It's pretty much a guy thing. We can't dress ourselves to save our lives, but we can quote tech specs of DVD players and high def TV's ad infinitum.

But, you have to pace these developments out a bit because it takes a substantial amount of time to convince the wife or girlfriend. I was going to use the 'and/or girlfriend' here, until I realized that would result in a round of questions that I would be better off avoiding. My rule of thumb is that I can usually successfully argue that an upgrade is needed around once every other year. Efforts to accelerate this schedule are rarely victorious.

Overall then, it looks like I'll not be adding 3D TV to any Christmas, birthday, or national holiday lists soon. Notice I left off anniversary - most men, those who stay married for more than a year or two anyhow, just instinctively know, because their wives' told them, that if they want to stay married they will not buy any consumer electronics for an anniversary gift. Ever.

So every once in a while I manage to accurately forecast the future. It's a gift, a weighty gift for sure, but one that I wield with humility and forbearance. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. Of course, Mary does like to point out that if one were to calculate the percentage of accurate forecasts over time, I'd probably fall below blind random chance. And she has graphs to back her up. But that's why I love her, because the way to an engineer's heart is through graphs. And a Van de Graaff generator, but since the incident with the dog, of which we have vowed never to speak of again, I no longer get to experiment with that.

So, sure, I might have missed out on the flying cars and home nuclear reactors. And fembots seem to be taking an inordinately long time to appear on the scene. But I did accurately predict that laserdiscs were doomed although this was canceled out by the bet I made on Betamax format video tape. A long time ago, many years in fact, I predicted that electronic media books would one day become the predominate form of written material and lo, my precognitive abilities seem to be bearing fruit.

According to a number of media sources Amazon announced that during the last quarter 143 e-books sold for every 100 hard cover books. Of course this doesn't mean that e-books are the ascendant media yet - paperback sales have to be several multiples of hard cover sales. Still it looks like the trend is towards electronic media and away from paper. As I predicted.

Now, if I could just get a personal force field so I can avoid having to listen to other peoples' inane cell conversations, I'd be in 21st century heaven. Oh, and would someone please get cracking on the fembots?

It's that time of the year again. The time I dread, well, a little, though not nearly as much as say, Tax Day for instance, or Annual Check-Up Day, or Scrubbing Tile and Grout Day, not to mention Colonoscopy Day which, thank god only happens once every five years, but I do find myself wincing every anniversary. So there are any number of annual or semi-annual rituals that are worse then the present. Of course the present time is special in its own way because it's Jane Austen Week.

Once a year Mary pulls out the combined works of Her Holiness, the Sainted Jane Austen, and curls up in front of a fire with a nice pot of English Breakfast tea and is transported away to Regency England. For the next four to six days I will, except for a small supporting role of as purveyor of tea and biscuits, for all intents cease to exist.

I should mention that this year is a little unusual in that Mary is getting her Austen on during the summer. Usually the Jane Austen Festival is held during the fall or winter when curling up in front of a fireplace and drinking hot beverages is not Alan Moore level insanity (though I should note here that, for the record, Alan Moore is also an English type person - just saying). I suppose Mary could jack up the air conditioning to maximum polar output, but that would be irresponsible both for the environment and our budget. And because we don't actually have air conditioning. Oh, and before you start sending money to the Mike and Mary Air Conditioning Fund, please be aware that up here in the mountains we really don't need it, unlike you flatlanders, stewing away in your own juices. We also don't need a high-speed motorboat either, but that fund is open and accepting donations.