#1052 Twain Marked

Every now and then I look back at one of my commentaries and realize how filled they are with modern stuff. In the last essay, I wrote about Blackberries, iPhones, Twitter, and Tweets. Mark Twain would never Twitter. He would have been stifled by their free verse American haiku.
Mark Twain says no to Twitter. Never the Twain shall tweet.
So much has changed, even since the fifties. I remember the first time I saw a seatbelt in a car. It was just plain in the way, and uncomfortable to sit on with its giant airplane passenger buckle. There were no airbags or whiplash-preventing headrests either.
Next time you see some guy driving by in a vintage car, check out how his head and shoulders seem to stick up unnaturally high from the seat. You were really exposed. Truck trailers didn’t have crash guards back then either, so the fifties was an era of unfortunate decapitations.
And they said we lost our heads in the sixties...
I sat in a hydroplane the other day. Now there’s protection. The pilot’s seat had a wraparound contour and the headrest had little wings curving out on either side so when you had your helmet on it would wedge in and make your head nearly immobile.
The thing that bugged me about it was there wasn’t enough room to hold my cellphone to my ear. Worse, the entire hydroplane cockpit had no cupholder.
I remember cars from the fifties only had indentations on the inside of the glove compartment door. You didn’t see them till you flopped the door open. The depressions were so shallow they didn’t really hold the cups, so there were plenty of messes when my mom would bump her knees on the underside of the glove compartment door and upend chocolate malteds.
That was when we went to burger joints without carhops. Mark Twain would have loved carhops. And I think they’re the answer to global warming. How many times have you waited endlessly in a drive-thru coffee joint, your idling car engine spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?
Carhops would clear than line out quicker than you can Google Huck Finn.
America, ya gotta love it.