#282 Lie-Pods & Things

The other day I was watching this girl boogie down the road. Wires sprouted from the side of her head, presumably clinging to earphones lodged in the recesses of her ears. The wires connected to something hanging around her neck. It flopped out like a pendulum having convulsions, occasionally banging the young lass on the sternum but she was so wrapped up in the thumping beat inside her head that the potential bruising went unnoticed. I wondered how surprised she would have been to learn that the boogie-pod dangling from her neck, this symbol of freedom and individuality, was a direct descendent of the machine that imprisoned thousands of women from an earlier generation in inhumane office pools as they performed hours of mindless data transference. That’s right, the Ipod is the direct descendent of the Dictaphone. “Hey Brittany, nice Dictaphone.” “Yeah, it’s really cool Morgan, the digital readout has emoticons, I can put the entire catalogue of Shakira on it and it doesn’t fill up, it’s limewire compatible and I can actually listen to four songs before it runs out of battery.” “Wow they’ve really done a lot with crappy audio.” “Yeah and look at the new 2000 dollar set of wheels I put on my Nova.” “Cool Spinners.” “I know, it makes the car look like it’s going fast even when it’s standing still. And I can run all the way to McDonalds and back before my dad has to put the trickle charger on the battery.” “So you just kinda want to make it look like a hot rod.” “Yeah but I can’t afford any of that engine and performance stuff. I just want it to look hot. I call it my I-Rod.” “Sweet, I-Rod kind of like a hot rod but not hot.” “Yeah, but I still got the looks.” “You got the look.” “I got the look?” “You got the look.”
Who’da thunk it. Mp3 an intellectual descendant of the Dictaphone. Cut out the low-priority-to-human-hearing resonant bits, mush it all together and what do you got? An apple with a rotten core. But what a fine sweet lustrous skin. And as anyone who has a modern computer media player program knows, the skin is what’s in. The hell with nutritious full-bodied sound. Put a psychedelic light show on the computer screen and your song rocks. Well it’s all for the good, cause it put Mackie back in town. Mac is back and Apple is once again associated more with computers than dead insects. And with Macintosh on the re-emergence Bill and his Window boys are having to be a little more conciliatory, and as a result a lot of Mac stuff can now be used on the same computer as Windows. By having both operating systems on the same computer. Kind of Co-operating systems. Wow. If Mac and Windows cooperate and big box stores get drive-thru lanes for their mass market electronics, I can hear it now. “Can I help you sir?” “Yeah, I’ll have the McWindows value system.” “All right sir, would you like a fry-pod with that?”
America, ya gotta love it.