#114 Data Heavy, That’s My Brother

My Bother-in-law, I mean Brother-in-law, and I were having a discussion the other day. It was about wide-screen versus full-screen. He maintained that full-screen was better because it filled up all the black space on the TV. I maintained that wide-screen was better cause after a while your brain ignores the black and the benefit was you got to see what was happening at the edges of movies. If two people were talking on either side of the screen, the image didn’t have to keep shifting back and forth unless that was what the director intended in the first place. We were watching the movie the Perfect Storm at the time. “But I like a bigger image,” he protested.
“It’s not the size of the boat,” I replied, “it’s the motion of the ocean.”
“Maybe you just need a bigger TV,” he muttered. Still, I continued to assert that you get more for your money with wide screen. The over-all image may be smaller but the movie itself is wider.
That got us on another track: Cellphones. He thinks I should stop being the last holdout from the 20th century and get a cellphone. I said what was supposed to be something that freed people was in fact confining them. When you have a cellphone, people expect you to carry it and when you carry it, people expect you to have it on. Ordinary polite people, who would never think of calling you at home at odd hours, do so every minute of every day if you have a cell phone. You can’t just drive off somewhere or go to the supermarket and get away from it all. You’re always findable and always reachable and if you’re not it’s because you rudely turned off your phone, not that they rudely called you in the middle of your lunch break. So, in fact, you’re even less free than you were before you had it. No wonder people have shortened the name to just plain cell. Call me on my cell. Call me at my cell is more like it.
Anyhow, I was digging through a pile of papers in this bowl we have in our kitchen area looking for a phone number. “You know,” he said, “you could put all those numbers in your cellphone—if you had one.” I looked at the pile of papers in my hand. “I don’t think they’d fit,” I said. But that got me thinking. If you add numbers into your cellphone, does it make it heavier? You have more data there than you did before. Electrons may be light but they’re not completely weightless. Is one of the reasons they keep making the outsides lighter and sleeker because the insides of cellphones are getting so full and heavy? And how about those picture phones? Get a wad of photos in em and these things have got to be bulging at the seams. That might explain why all the young people’s pants sag down so much; their cellphones are getting too heavy. And that probably happens with your regular computer too. It doesn’t start to run slower because it’s getting clogged up. When you pack in all that internet data it’s like packing in too many calories. Your computer just gets overweight. Computers go slow cause they’re fat.
Talk about wide screen. Your computer’s getting chubby, dude, you need to put it on a data diet. Go to Richard e-Simmons dot com today.
America, ya gotta love it.