When did people start ending every conversation with “be safe. Keep yourself safe”? Am I the only one that wonders when it was decided that we are living in a time of war or zombie attacks? And why is it so incredibly sad to know that the enemy we’re being cautioned against is a disease too often spread to us by our own loved ones and ‘friends’?
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I continue to be in perpetual awe of human technology if for no other reason than it’s the dividing line between us and the rest of the animal kingdom except maybe cats who have been secretly running the planet for nearly 5,000 years without so much as giving us a heads up. Opposable thumbs have led us to more than just cracking coconuts open and banging rocks together in hopes of getting a record deal. Our search for knowledge fuels our desire to create better tools to obtain that knowledge faster so that we might then have more time to waste using time-wasting tools. It’s a perpetual cycle.
We were promised a paperless society by the technology gurus of the 1980s. It’s been over 30 years since IBM launched the concept of the desktop computer. It was going to revolutionize personal communication – even before the advent of the internet – and they were right. But that vision was gratuitously optimistic. I worked for the company that built the wiring systems for these beasts…back when they were the size of a gas furnace and ran on steam power and 47″ floppy discs containing 64k of memory. We were contracted to build about 150 wiring systems a week for their machines. I went to head office in Don Mills where they had motorized robotic pool tables shuttling CPU’s and 70 lb. Scare-o-Vision cathode driven monitors through a warehouse larger than Cape Canaveral. They were moving 10 of these units at a time…and over the course of a year they were selling less than 50,000 of these.
Thintelligence: “The state of mind where a person does something without considering the consequences.” The idea may seem brilliant at first, but the after-affects usually prove to be deadly. This phrase was invented by Michael Crichton in his 1990 book Jurassic Park.
“They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences.
I continue to be in perpetual awe of human technology if for no other reason than it’s the dividing line between us and the rest of the animal kingdom except maybe cats who have been secretly running the planet for nearly 5,000 years without so much as a word about it. Opposable thumbs have led us to more than just cracking coconuts open and banging two rocks together in hopes of getting a record deal.
One of my favourite bands of all time, Klaatu, had a song entitled ‘Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III’ about an old sea Captain who recalls his adventures on the edge of the world and boasts that he’d been to hell and come back alive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izt6-Bb1ZXY
I now know how he felt.
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 