Last week I saw a short video that demonstrated an amazing new fabric. Controlled by a small “smartphone” application, this fabric changes color. It is very expensive, so the only people who will have garments made from it are teenagers.
If you’re of a certain age, when you hear the phrase “the silent majority” you probably think of Richard Nixon. He used the phrase in the sense that while the loudest and weirdest voices make up the majority of the news broadcasts, they do not make up the majority of the people, who go quietly about their business, saving their opinions for when they matter.
We’ve gotten weird as each successive round of the Culture Wars seems further proof. In this week’s edition, we learn that mocking someone else’s religion is apparently inclusive while defending other people’s beliefs is far-right. Got that?
When I was a WOR Radio in the early 1980s everyone smiled when Bruce Eliot came into the newsroom to get a cup of our superior coffee. He was an amiable guy, always with a good joke.
It’s a little mortifying to learn that the Temptations’ hit song, “Ball of Confusion” was a hit 53 years ago. The worrying part is how long ago it was released. And how it came a half century too early.
Coincidence, surely, is the reason that the two places on earth I’d most like to visit (but probably never will) are islands.
Just writing this column is going to make me uncomfortable, because I certainly don’t like thinking about how many subscriptions I’ve gotten roped into. Not that long ago if you’d said “subscription,” I’d have thought “magazine.” Now, I think “everything.” Precisely how many subscriptions can we stomach?
Time was, and it’s well within living memory, that the nicest thing you could say about an audio amplifier as found in a high-fidelity system or “stereo,” was that it was “a piece of wire.”
The headline last week would have been hopeful news indeed, if we hadn’t been here so many times before. “Cancer and heart disease vaccines ‘ready by end of the decade’” was the story in The Guardian.