essaysfromtheedge

Beam Me Up.... PLEASE!

The newest craze in fashionable high-tech is not the iPhone. It's that stupid-looking little bluetooth gadget you stick in your ear so you can do "hand's-free" cell phoning.



The gadget itself is a pretty clever idea. The problem I have, being an old fart who remembers when stuff like this was the fodder of campy sci-fi, is the people who use them never take them out of their head; even when they're not on the phone. It's become akin to jewelry - an earring for the un-pierced.



I've been calling these folks - both behind their backs and to their faces - Bionic Men (and Women). You're in a coffee shop and some guy is chatting away with an apparent apparition (until you see the little gee-gaw sticking out of the side of his face). He "hangs up" (definitely an outdated colloquialism if there ever was one), and he leaves the thing in; like it's stuck there with some epoxy made up of one part chutzpah, one part laziness.



No matter how cool you think you look, this thing instantly dashes any inkling of hipness straight out the window.



Remember the story of the woman who spent 6 years on her couch, and eventually her skin grafted to the couch? She died when the medical folks tried to separate her and her furniture. This is certainly the fate of our android friends.



I've stopped calling these folks Bionic Men (Women). Just like our cell phones bear a remarkable resemblance to Star Trek's Communicator, these little ear buds look too similar to Uhura's communication ear piece for me to pass up.



So, in future, everyone sporting a bluetooth headset will be called "Uhura."

Join me in the fun.



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posted by Tomás @ 8/22/2007 11:33:00 AM 0 comments

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree

I was reading the 40th Anniversary edition of Rolling Stone magazine today, and this image caught my eye:



It's from a December, 1967 protest in New York City of the Vietnam war.

Flash forward to the Iraq war protests, sometime between 2004 and present day:







Two things jump out at you.

1. The Left in America has nothing new to say, and

2. This protest movement is obviously being run by the same people who ran the Vietnam protest. Right down to equating the two wars (which is absurd on its face and really doesn't justify a response), the hard Left wraps itself in the humanistic mantle of pseudo-patriotism: pretending to care about the people in uniform, rather than caring for the mission of those people in uniform.

What they fail to understand is that their denigration of the mission ALSO denigrates the people, since this military is all-volunteer, and they see their worth as tied intimately to their work. It's a far cry from the drafted men who died in a war they did not support in Vietnam - our current troops believe in what they are doing.

And this is why the Left will ultimately lose: they are caught in a time bubble of their own devising, seeing this conflict - a just war against Islamic Fascism - in the same light as a war in southeast Asia they deemed unjust.

If it weren't for the 1967 photo, I would say it's the Oprah-ization of anti-war.

Clearly the anti-war movement is more about our values and culture than it is about our conflict with Islamic Fascism.


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posted by Tomás @ 8/03/2007 10:58:00 AM 0 comments