Published: April 26, 2008 11:41 pm            

CUMMINS: Does a smart person need a smart phone?

Don’t want to beat a dead horse or a live one either, but my central-nervous system is going bad. I don’t care if Obama and Hillary keep beating each other’s dead horses. Hillary slipped up by saying she was under sniper fire once in Bosnia. That was incorrect, but she’s been under sniper fire in the U.S. since Bill started acting up. Obama goofed when he said working people are so “bitter” they are turning to guns or religion, which should never be mixed.

What’s happening to the presidential candidates is that when they are put on a hot seat for a year, they will occasionally make verbal blunders. Just look at President Bush. He turned to religion and guns several years ago and now he’s almost totally incoherent.

What’s causing my frustration is not our political system, which is broken like when a buggy wheel falls off. The buggy starts wobbling, the horse gets excited and if you try to keep going, you will end up with a dead horse. No use beating it at that point.

Taking out my frustrations with a buggy whip will not help either. If I went out in the yard and began cracking a whip against a telephone pole, the neighbors would call 911. When an important segment of life passes us by, there should be a choice other than turning to religion, or God forbid, a gun.

What bothers me worse than a horsefly sucking blood on a horse’s rump (a common occurrence in the old days) is the disproportionate amount of effort I must exert in staying abreast of modern technology. Take the simple phone. Forgot dialing and talking to another person on the other end of the wire. Now you have to be smart enough to use a smart phone, which can put you in contact with anything in the known world.

You see, in the old days, we had a better chance of retaining our human characteristics, because we were not living in a digital-driven Information Age. A moderate amount of information is necessary, but you shouldn’t have to spend most waking hours searching for it in on a Web. Back then we’d go out at night and marvel at God’s stars lighting the way to heaven, but never imagined we’d be relying on satellites pinpointing exactly where we’re positioned on this earth.

Technology took off about a hundred year’s ago when Model Ts became available to the populace. Learning to drive created more excitement than a county fair, where you paid to see a fat lady eat three whole chickens. Men learned to drive first and then during the early stages of the equality movement, women got behind the wheel. When a Model T came speeding down a road kicking up dust and rocks, a horse pulling a buggy would become highly agitated and bolt into a stationary object. The death toll from wrecked buggies was staggering.

We have progressed, if you can call it that, from the internal combustion engine to the Google search engine. As an old timer, who used to churn butter for Mom, I can’t keep up with it all. A recent tech article advised, “Your mobile phone is about to get a lot cooler.” Great! If I had a mobile phone, I’d want it cooler than, as we used to say, a cucumber.

The geeks say you can actually “talk” to these latest mobile phones and dictate text messages, or surf the Web. If you have a question, simply dial 800-2chacha and smart people will text message the answer. I have a question. In the whole scheme of things, where am I?

Say you’re driving around and undecided about where to go to lunch. You can speak into the gadget and ask it to show a map of restaurants in the area. And while eating, you’ll be able to film movies and send live clips to live friends, who are probably also asking their smart phone complex questions. So we’ve gone from stupid phones to smart ones. People now need to make the same type conversion.

They say phones are actually morphing into minicomputers with much faster connections driving the changes. Speed is the name of the game. But look what happened when speeding cars replaced buggies. By the time I’ve figured out how to use a smart phone, they’ll have a genius one on the market replacing what’s left of my brain.

Send e-mail to TLCTLC@AOL.com or speak into a smart phone.

        

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