Coprolite Newsletter, December 2005

Christmas shopping this year really makes me feel my age. Not because I get tired traipsing through stores; my wife does most of our shopping on the Internet. And it’s not because I just had my birthday; I’ve pretty much learned to ignore those.

What makes me feel really old is that I have no understanding at all of this year’s most popular gadgets. I don’t even know what they’re for. It used to be fun browsing through catalogs from electronics stores. Now they’re written in some foreign lingo I don’t understand.

What is Bluetooth, some sort of dental disease? What is Wi-Fi, some new spelling for “wifey?” Whose wifey is she? And why do so many people seem to think it proper to discuss how to find her hot spots?

A lot of the big items now seem to be called x-this or i-that. I don’t know what any of those are either.

Gadgetry no longer evolves a bit each year, as before. Now it morphs into completely new forms every few days.

My granddaughter has a gadget about the size of a credit card that can store and play 500 of her favorite songs.

When I was her age, music came on 78 RPM records that weighed just under eight ounces. My 500 favorite tunes would have weighed almost 250 pounds, plus another 100 pounds or so for the Victrola to play them. I can’t quite imagine carrying that much music to school or a party.

Okay, theoretically I’d only have needed 250 78 RPM records, since they had a song on each side. However, only one side held a song you might call a “favorite.” The flip side was forgettable. Therefore, I would actually have needed 500 78s. No matter. I never owned more than a half dozen at a time, partly because of their high breakage rate.

Of course, my granddaughter’s music machine, being a few weeks old, is already obsolete. Now I understand there’s one that will hold 15,000 tunes. You could listen nonstop, day and night, for a month without hearing the same song twice. In my generation’s frame of reference, you’d need a sizable truck to haul that many recordings.

How do kids today have time to get to know 15,000 songs, or even 500? It’s got to be almost as big a challenge as it is for their grandparents to understand the latest gifts they might want.

My parents had it easier at Christmas. My mother always bought pajamas for our kids, and my dad took devious pleasure in buying them some toy that made a lot of noise. I bet he’d have loved those i-somethings that hold literally tons of tunes.

––Wayne Adams
wayne@coprolites.com
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