that new invention with all the tubes

I am kind of a news junky.  In addition to the New Yorker I get the Atlantic and Harpers.  I get both Chicago newspaper, and I listen to NPR most of the day.  I read a couple websites, Politico and The Hill daily.  I watch CNN sometimes, especially during an election and I drop in on the Foxies from time to time.

I'm thinking about the internet and I wonder if it is a special thing or just one more milestone on the road from the printing press, the telegram, the telephone, radio, and TV.  I think we can all remember when TV was ruining the country, and I believe the same thing was said about radio and the telephone.  Of course now the telephone has become the computer or vice versa.  I think that there is another milestone past the internet, what I like to call the Sooper Dooper phone.  Not only can you consult wiki from your barstool, but in addition to sending and getting emails you can text.

Here's where I lose it, texting.  Why, when you could write a leisurely reflective email, or if you were in more of a hurry, you could place a phone call, would you be pecking at that tiny screen and coming out with those awful little misspelled messages?

Oh and then there is facebook and twitter and those other things which are, well I don't even know what the hell they are.  I think facebook is maybe like tv in that the people that don't use it hate it, and the people who do use it hate it too.  Well facebook is a whole nother subject which we could probably spend a few posts on.

I have had a money making Ten Cat idea for twitter.  At the end of the bar, certainly not the west end of the bar where those two charming gents of a certain age welcome folks into the Ten Cat, but maybe that other end by the pool tables, they would have a twitter thing, maybe like an ATM and there would be a sign above it that read 'Tell the World what you think, tell them right now!" and anybody could sit down there and tweet to their heart's content.  But there would be a delay thing, where the Tweet would sit on disk before being sent.  In the morning the owners of the Ten Cat would call everybody who had left a tweet, and tell them that they would now be sending out that tweet, and maybe the tweeter would want to drop by the bar and drop a fiver and the message would be erased and never sent. 

With a money maker like that the good folks at the Ten Cat could save enough money to be able to afford free beers for the two charming gentleman at the west end of the bar.

But I think there is something qualitatively different between the internet, and the printing press.  It's always there, and through google you can ask it questions.  The only thing I can think of beyond the sooper dooper phone is that mind chip that lot of people are looking forward to, having been a little disappointed in those google glasses and Apple wrist phones.  And frankly the only difference
between the mind chip and the sooper phone is like a few seconds.

There was a pretty good movie about a dozen years ago called The Madness of King George, about that very George.  Yes indeed those Americans pissed him off.  Thank God we Americans don't piss anybody off these days.

Welcome Old Dog to the ivied walls of The Institute.