Can You Hear Me Now

How quickly we forget what life was like before the internet sat in our pockets. Not to mention lifelines to every last one of our friends. Not to mention every little distracting bleep and bloop we're used to pulling up for any dull moment in our frenetic little lives.

Well. Okay. You don't forget that. I do.

Last time my smartphone went goodbye, it was because of my stupidity and someone else's avarice. This time, if my smartphone is hitting that old dusty trail, it's due to simple entropy. Time eats everything, even the shiny expensive bits I put at the center of my life.

Last night I couldn't find people because I didn't have a phone. I couldn't even borrow someone else's phone to call the people in question, because I'd saved the necessary numbers in the phone instead of in my head. It got me wondering: How many addresses do I remember? How many phone numbers? How many birthdays can I pull up from thin air without Facebook or Calendar reminding me?

I read somewhere that if you kidnap an Aboriginal tribesman from the mythical land of barbies and eskys and put him in the middle of a city half a world away, he'll have an easier time getting around than you. See, Hypothetical Aboriginal Tribesman's language has no words for right, left, etc...just east, west, north, south. As in "you dropped your pen, sir, it landed three feet south of your feet."

Put me in the middle of the Loop without the lake in plain view, on the other hand, and I'd be grabbing at smartphones or screaming questions into taxis. Thanks for the lasting knowledge, technology.

It's not the end of the world, though: I'm about to use my computer to call the technicians working on my phone. The future's a strange place, sometimes.

Whoa! Words all over the place! Words Words Words. Deceptively competent English at first glance, until you see lines like "the shine brilliantly one another, s wonder in the Tienshan Mountains." I like it, though; I think the broken English adds to the mysterious power of the visuals. Like a stereotypical wise old merchant running a curio shop.

Ahhh. Brochures. I wonder if the writers also wrote did this Mystic Grand Canyon writeup. I give them an A for effort and several thousand A pluses for entertaining execution.