Fifty Shades of Black (22 page)

 

 

The Father of the Couch Potato

H
ow long have we had TV remotes to play with? Ten years, you figure? Twenty, maybe? You're way off. TV browsers were around before most of the people reading this were born. Before man walked on the moon. Before the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup, even. We're talking Mesozoic here.

The TV remote has been around since 1955 when a Chicago engineer named Eugene Polley invented it. Polley's prototype wasn't exactly the sleek plastic pellet with eleven dozen buttons that we're used to losing in the sofa pillows nowadays. His invention looked like a ray gun from sci-fi special effects. It had a pistol-grip handle and a trigger and it was called the Zenith Flash-Matic. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.

Well . . . sort of. Polley's ray gun worked a bit like a flashlight. The viewer pointed it at one of the four corners of the TV screen and pulled the trigger. The top left-hand corner of the screen contained a photocell that would turn the TV on and off. You aimed at the top right-hand corner if you wanted to go to the next channel; the bottom left-hand corner if you wanted to go back to a previous channel; and the bottom right-hand corner if you wanted to mute out what Polley called “those noisy TV commercials.”

Or perhaps I've mixed up the corners. A lot of viewers did, which was one big complaint about the Flash-Matic. Another was the fact that the TV photocells frequently reacted with ordinary sunlight to change channels, go on and off, or mess with the volume, all on their own.

It wasn't perfect, but it was revolutionary. Eugene Polley modestly suggested his invention was “the most important invention since the wheel.”

Well, hardly—but it was a major influence on television productions and the way we watch the box.

Before Polley's Flash-Matic, viewers who wanted to adjust the volume or change the channel were forced to put their feet on the floor, levitate to a vertical position, walk across the room and interact with the TV manually. Humans, being the lethargic creatures we are, often elected to put up with whatever drivel was emanating from the screen, rather than, you know, actually getting off our lard butts and moving.

The result was some astonishingly mediocre television fare (anyone remember
The Arthur Godfrey Show
?). Eugene Polley's Flash-Matic changed that. It allowed viewers to be discriminating AND lazy. We swiftly developed into a species with the attention span of a fruit fly. Horatio flapping his gums on
CSI Miami
? Zap it in favour of the Nature Channel. Oops, a pollution special—bo-ring! ZAP! Check ESPN. Uh-oh—Jeep commercial. ZAP.

The Flash-Matic is no longer with us, but its heirs and successors are. Back in its day Flash-Matic had to contend with no more than twelve channels, maximum. Today's browsers navigate a universe of hundreds of channels, not to mention computer games, the Internet and our personal music libraries.

No need to get off the couch at all, really. We hardly need our legs anymore. Perhaps over the next millennia or two our DNA will morph and mutate so that those massive, now useless thigh and calf muscles get diverted to where they'd really be of use—in our thumbs.

Eugene Polley won't be there to see it. He died recently at the age of ninety-six, still convinced that he'd made a seminal contribution to human civilization. “The flush toilet might be the most civilized invention ever devised,” he told a reporter, “but the remote control is the next most important.”

Um, actually Eugene, there are those among us who wouldn't have minded if that first remote control had been accidentally flushed down the first flush toilet.

 

 

When Ya Gotta Go . . .

I
can't go to the bathroom anymore.

No, no, it's not that. There's nothing wrong with the personal plumbing; it's the public washrooms that don't work for me anymore.

I hail from the horse-and-buggy days of public washrooms. In my day, if you wanted to flush a toilet, you pressed the shiny doohickey on the tank and you were done. To wash your hands, you turned on the hot-water tap (left) and the cold-water tap (right) until an agreeably comfortable flow gushed from the spout and you scrubbed away. Drying the washed hands was a simple feat: a couple of paper towels from the handy wall dispenser would do the trick.

That's not how it works anymore. Approach a sink in a modern public washroom with your hands lathered up in supplication and you trip a sensor—which decides how much water you will get, and what temperature it will be. Usually that means a tepid squirt that wouldn't wash the lint from a gerbil's navel. No matter—your hands are at least dampish now, which means you need some paper towels to . . .

Not so fast, forest killer! Modern public washrooms don't do paper towels. They provide eco-friendly, environmentally responsible sanitary hand dryers that produce warm air to dry your hands.

Theoretically.

The machine wails like a banshee; you look like an idiot trying to shake hands with yourself and your hands remain wet and dripping. No problem. Now you can wipe them on the inside of your pant legs and creep out of the washroom, trying not to look like a pervert.

Of course I haven't even mentioned those most inconvenient of all the public conveniences—that sombre line of metal stalls ranged against the back wall.

The toilets.

They've been modernized too. Gone is the shiny, manually operated flush lever on the toilet tank. It's been replaced by another sensor. A very sensitive sensor. It responds to your every bodily movement. Thus, when you open the stall door, the toilet flushes. When you take off your jacket, it flushes again. It flushes when you sit down; it flushes when you stand up. The water I waste in one trip to a public toilet stall would probably irrigate a Saskatchewan wheat farm through a drought.

That's one scenario. Often the sensor doesn't work. At all. And you are left with a toilet you would dearly like to flush . . . but there's no flush handle.

Perhaps if you waved your arm. Or your leg. Or both legs and both arms.

This helps to explain those noisy, desperate shuffles you occasionally hear emanating from the stalls of public washrooms. It sounds like some
So You Think You Can Dance
hopeful in there, executing a complicated routine but no, it's just some poor schlub trying to activate a balky toilet stall sensor.

They're not done tinkering with our public toilets either. Toto, a Japanese toilet manufacturer, has unveiled a model they call the Neorest AH tankless toilet. No toilet paper with this baby—instead the “client” is treated to an extremely personal wash and blow-dry all activated by, yes, an unseen sensor. Cost of the Neorest AH tankless toilet? Four thousand dollars.

All so I can experience what happens to my jalopy in a hands-free car wash? No thanks.

I'll just hold it until I get home.

 

 

If the Phone Rings, It's Not for Me

P
eople ask me if I have a cell.

Trillions, I think. But I know what they mean. I tell them yes, I have a cell.

Oh, good, they say, and they ask me for the number.

It doesn't matter, I tell them, because I never have my cellphone on.

Then why do you have one, they ask me. So I can call someone if I need to, I say.

But . . . if somebody wants to get hold of you, they can't, they point out.

Exactly, I tell them.

The reason I carry a cellphone is that I'm a geezer who likes to walk in the bush, sometimes on pretty sketchy trails. One of these days I might slide on a root, trip on a rock or fall down a hill. If my luck continues to deteriorate, chances are I'll break something. When that happens (assuming I survive) I'd like to be found by Search and Rescue, not turkey vultures. Ergo, my cellphone. It's for emergencies.

Contrary to popular belief it is not that life-threatening to be “out of touch” with the rest of the world for brief periods of time. Humankind managed brief forays into solitude for millennia before Samsung and RIM and Nokia came along. For most of my life it's been the norm to rely on land lines, Canada Post, a loud wolf whistle or a polite “ahem” when one wanted to make contact with somebody else.

Otherwise, you were on your own.

Nowadays people are seldom on their own except when they're asleep. People check their BlackBerrys in restaurants and theatre lobbies, on buses and subways, in elevators and waiting rooms. When my plane touches down—as soon as the wheels touch the tarmac—there's an in-cabin frenzy as passengers paw for their smart phones to see if they've missed any calls or text messages while they were temporarily aloft and out of contact.

What did they do before cellphones? They thought, I suppose. They daydreamed and fantasized, stargazed and woolgathered.

They retained some mental space in their life.

Seems to be out of fashion now. Recently we had a guest (I'm not naming names but you know who you are) over for dinner and a TV movie. The dinner went well; the movie not so much. Said guest sat hunched over his smart phone furtively text-messaging for an hour and a half.

Such behaviour would have been considered boorish even a decade ago but it's rather commonplace now. People think nothing of being in your company and talking to somebody else who's not present. Weird.

Once I saw a young couple in an intimate bistro sitting at a table adorned with a candle and a lovely white rose in a vase. Very romantic. Except they were not holding hands or murmuring sweet nothings to each other. They were each bent forward, peering into their handhelds and text-messaging . . . who? Who the hell would be important enough to talk to at a moment, in a situation, like that?

How has such a tiny piece of technology come to have such power over us? We should have seen it coming.

More than a hundred years ago, when the clunky old telephone was a brand new invention, a forward-thinking Frenchman had one installed in his château, then invited the painter Edgar Degas to dinner.

He also pre-arranged to have a friend phone him during dinner so that he could impress Degas.

Dinner was served, the phone rang, the Frenchman rose with a flourish and talked on the telephone for a few minutes, then returned, glowing with pride to the table.

“So that is the telephone,” Degas said gloomily. “It rings and you run.”

 

 

Caution: Future Dead Ahead

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

—Anon

I
ndeed it ain't. I've just learned that the Nickelodeon cable network is preparing to launch a new block of programming whimsically entitled “The 90s Are All That.”

Yes, it's TV that recycles a decade. No, they're not talking about the 1890s.

I can't even remember the 1990s—and I don't drink or do drugs.

It's not that I'm nostalgia challenged. I feel a distinct sense of mourning for family farms, elm trees, ten-cent coffee and drive-in movies.

I miss milkmen, gas station attendants, paperboys and telephone receptionists.

I long for the heft of a real typewriter, metal hotel room keys, vinyl records—and I'd swap my flimsy plastic cellphone lozenge for a good old clunky rotary job in a heartbeat.

But that's not the world we live in anymore. Today, trends pop up on the far horizon and then disappear with a whoosh in the rear-view mirror before we have a chance to hiccup.

It took Tolstoy six years to write
War and Peace
. The media phenomenon known as “Shit My Dad Says” went from original Twitter feed to YouTube sensation to bestseller to hit TV series in just six weeks. I grant you, in terms of quality there is some distance between the two works, but still . . .

Last year, in a moment of lemming-like consumer delusion, I briefly considered lashing out eight hundred bucks for a brand new state-of-the-art iPad. Good thing I resisted. The launch of the next state-of-the-art iPad earlier this year has rendered the original hopelessly obsolete.

It's not just iPads—have you got an iPod? Put it on eBay, pal. The iPhone was a dagger in the back of the iPod, the sales of which have been sagging steadily for the past three years.

While you're at it, dump your discs. I'm not talking about LPs and 45s—they've been extinct for eons. I mean your floppy discs, your mini-discs, yea, even your CDs and DVDs. iTunes and Netflix are pushing them off the cliff even as I type these words on my laughably out-of-date laptop (two years old and ready for the scrapyard).

Those CDs still make nifty drink coasters, though. And if you string a few of them together and hang them in the garden they might keep the starlings away.

Some old technologies refuse to lie down and die.

Fax machines, those mastodons of office communication, lurk on desktops everywhere—right beside the computers and scanners that were supposed to replace them.

Film cameras are supposed to be dead and buried—the world's last roll of Kodachrome colour film was processed at Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas, not long ago—but diehard purists insist that digital photos lack the “soul” of old-fashioned film. Wishful thinking or not, you can still buy film for your Kodak Brownie.

Back about the time North Americans were first getting used to the idea of telephones and electric lights there lived a nephew of the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse named Red Fox. He was a chief himself, a learned man and an early advocate for aboriginal rights. In his autobiog­raphy he wrote: “I met Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and many others who impressed me as great people, but pride in them and their achievements has not over-awed me, for I am not convinced that the comforts and advancements which they have brought to the world have made people more content and happy than the Indians were through the centuries on the mountains, prairies and deserts of the primeval, virgin continent.”

A few years ago a tourist in Washington, DC, was riding in a taxi past the National Archives and noticed the legend carved in granite across the front of the building. It read: “WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE.”

“What does that mean?” the tourist asked.

“It means,” said the driver, “that you ain't seen nothin' yet.”

I fear that both Chief Red Fox and the Washington cabbie were right.