Maybe it isn’t considered the age of Invention and Wonder, but the years of my youth included enough newly imagined products that it may have de-sensitized me to the process. I didn’t grow up during the Industrial Revolution, but the latter part of the twentieth century did bring out eye-openers like the cellular telephone. And the weedwacker.
(That’s probably not a good description of the range, but you get the idea.)
There were many new items on many new fronts. Microwave ovens. Video games, beginning at Atari. Pong. Oooh. Calculator watches (I didn’t say all the inventions were keepers…)
In the days of my growing up – my youth – we’d turn around and something new would hit us in the face. Sometimes literally. (I got whacked on the forehead by a Frisbee at a Jethro Tull concert at the Convention Center. Ironically, I had just turned back around after warning my buddy Mike to be on the lookout for flying disks. It was his first concert, and I was the experienced venue-pro. Naturally, it hit me instead of him.)
I’ve never surveyed it, but I imagine some people believe these things have been around since the dawn of man. Nah. In a historical sense, many of our everyday comforts are recent contrivances. I remember when Mountain Dew first came out. Yellow liquid that looked a lot like – well, let’s say it didn’t look particularly appealing when poured in a clear glass. That’s why it came out in a green bottle, I suppose.
Something new would come out, and it seemed to be generally accepted without a lot of hoopla or fanfare. I don’t remember lines of people camped out overnight for a chance to buy a portable Compaq computer. (They were so large as to be only marginally portable.) No midnight-opening events for the eight-track tape players. Or the cassettes. None for the VHS, BetaMax, or VideoDisk either, as I recall. (Early DVDs were the size of vinyl records, but I’m betting few of you recall those beasts.)
They might generate a brief Wow, or Hmmmm. The more elaborate items could draw out a Cool! (Or Far-Out, as it tended to be expressed back then.)
Now, though, I find myself taking the time to actually marvel about the products being introduced. Not the phones. I know some of you live and breathe for your cels, but – old school as I am – those are still just telephones to me. And I’ve never been that keen on phone conversations.
Bluetooth, now – that definitely rates a ten on the coolness scale for me. Here, I’ve just berated the cellphone and now I have to backtrack and admit I like being able to take a picture with it and – through a series of onscreen menu choices – send it through the air to my computer. Wireless. Cool. Far-Out. Awesome.
Here’s another. The image is of an approaching storm the other evening. I wasn’t near a television or radio, and knew there was a threat of nasty weather.
“Where is that storm?, I wondered aloud, talking to myself as I am wont to do these days. “How can I find out?”
There is an app for that. Downloaded a powerful weather radar program that even allowed it to email the radar-sweep to someone. I sent a copy to myself, just to see what it looked like on the other end. Click on it and you’ll notice the first wave of severe weather has already moved east of Tulsa and the big blob is still approaching. The calm between the storms was the impetus for my downloading the application. They’d said another wave was coming, and I just wanted to be able to see it. Bam! There it is. Oooh.
The picture of the storm is a still image, but the application does the whole deal, the line that sweeps around in a circle like the second hand of a clock, updating the intensity-color-shades as it passes. Just like the toys of the big TV boys (and girls).
I’m still marveling at the fact that I have access, 24 hours a day, to the same sophisticated technology that the meteorologists have. Of course, I have little or no understanding of what the different settings and screens are for, but I know the big red blobs are danger, Will Robinson. Green? Good. Red, bad. Green, good. Awesome.
There you have the summary of my weather-radar savvy. Color-based.
Cool.
